New Army War College Blog

The Small Wars Journal notes the U.S. Army War College has launched an Information as Power blog:

Information is an element of national power along with diplomatic, military and economic power. The current information environment challenges the United States as never before. It has leveled the playing field for not only nation states, but non-state actors, multinational corporations and even individuals to affect strategic outcomes with minimal information infrastructure and little capital expenditure. The Information as Power web site is an online resource that provides an electronic library of current and historical articles and documents. Its purpose is to facilitate an understanding of the information element of power in this new and difficult environment in order to better address the national security issues we currently face. Unlike sites focused on one aspect of the information element this site attempts to broadly consider all the dimensions of the information environment: physical, informational and cognitive.

A lot of what the Army is doing right now is using social software to discuss the power of the information environment resulting from the widespread changes in the information space. I think the benefit of social software tools to the military will eventually be topics other than the subject of information itself, and social software will eventually become a tool to develop and collaborate ideas from working experience directly applicable to their tasks at hand.

My suggestion towards that would be something like a Naval Diplomacy Blog at the Naval War College committed to the promotion of concepts surrounding naval diplomacy, which I think should include exploring strategic concepts from an academic view on topics like escalation control in the 21st century and perhaps even gunboat diplomacy in the 21st century. Naval diplomacy has become a huge part of our national soft power, but naval diplomacy is also the way the Navy executes its own maritime strategies mission statement towards the prevention of war.

The Naval War College is in a unique position for promoting academic discussions along a broad range of naval diplomacy topics and collaborating with foreign policy experts on these subjects across the globe. Keep in mind, the Navy is a global service and naval diplomacy is an existing, globally executed mission today. The CO of a US Navy ship making port in another country has attended the Naval War College, AND in many cases, the naval officer of the foreign country partner being met attended the Naval War College. Just think about how that adds to the development of ideas...

I am a huge fan of RADM James Wisecup, and have been hearing the rumors for his plans at the Naval War College. If even half of what I have heard is true, that school is going to become the envy of professional education (as if it wasn't already!) in the world.

In the past, folks who head up the Naval War College go there to retire, but I don't think that is the case with RADM Wisecup. I think it is simply one stop on a train that still has a long road ahead.