Tom at SWJ

Dave Dilegge over at Small Wars Journal asked for thoughts on new media and the military. He compiled them in this pdf: Thoughts on the "New Media". Here's Tom's part:

My sense is that what we're seeing are non-mainstream media venues increasingly serving as the center of gravity for new thinking and new consensus in all sorts of fields. The MSM finds this disturbing, considering itself to the be the final arbiter of such things when it comes to issues of interest to the public, and so routinely seeks to sell a sense a hierarchy by which unconventional venues are natural feeders to conventional ones, almost like entrepreneurial firms go to market with their new products via big firms. But ideas are more viral, obviously, and so the assumption that they need the institutional blessing of established actors is more suspect. When you're talking about a hierarchical institution like the military, assumptions of feeder-versus-fed are even harder to trump, and yet operational experience throughout this long war has consistently triggered new conventions (no surprise in itself given the length of conflict).

What's different is the breakdown of the Cold War wall between the realm of military and civilian, meaning we see military learning and discovering outside their accepted range of norms, in subject matters for which there is no natural hierarchy within military thinking. In the vernacular of William Easterly, development expert, we now see a struggle between converted (by experience) "searchers" who find their answers on the ground and "planners" who still prefer it from on high. Among the Green (as opposed to the Blue), the searchers are achieving the upper hand and, to no great surprise, are exploiting media that circumvent the usual codification processes preferred by planners.