Linked in the Fight

Log on, learn and live another day.

In the spring of 2000, a pair of West Point graduates started talking behind the Army's back. Maj. Nate Allen and Maj. Tony Burgess were commanding companies in the 25th Infantry Division (Light) in Hawaii, which hadn't seen combat action since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. At night, Allen and Burgess would sit on their front porch and, like company commanders for generations, swap stories about how to fight wars.

They talked about other topics, too: professional connections, the Army's ongoing transformation initiative, their troops' personal lives. Commanding a company is an intimate job, and comparing notes is vital when young officers are just beginning to understand the subtleties of leadership. As much as it apparently kept them going, Allen and Burgess were frustrated that their late-night porch sessions involved only themselves.

Back at the Pentagon, the Army brass was fretting that soldiers' training left them ill-prepared to fight. Then-Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki commissioned a study that found the Army's doctrinaire methods were smothering bright thinking. Wedded to routine, the service was failing to innovate.

The Army couldn't have known it then, but what Allen and Burgess did next helped dispel the notion that modern soldiers weren't independent thinkers, and spawned perhaps the biggest conversation about tactics in Army history. Using their own savings, Allen and Burgess launched a Web site, CompanyCommand.com, without the Army's formal blessing. They invited other company commanders to log on and start talking.

Not unlike message boards and chat rooms that flower across the Internet for all manner of professions and passions, CompanyCommand attracted followers worldwide. They shared musings on maneuvers, motivational techniques, tips for coping with foot problems on the battlefield and more. In March 2003, when the war in Iraq began, commanders turned to the site for insights on battling an insurgency, finding advice on how to avoid roadside bombs and how to avoid offending Iraqis. By its fourth anniversary, CompanyCommand boasted 10,000 members-more than 30 percent of the Army's captains.

From this success came CompanyCommand: Unleashing the Power of the Army Profession (Great Impressions, 2005), a chronicle of the site's rise and a how-to manual for creating professional forums.

Allen and Burgess teamed with fellow officers Pete Kilner and Steve Schweitzer and organizational scholar Nancy M. Dixon to create a work that is part textbook, part testament to the authors' belief that when like-minded, inquisitive people get together, on a porch or on the Internet, something "great" happens: "When a member posts a question, the community of members blow him away with their response. As a result of the experience, he is a more effective commander and he has a greater appreciation of the forum as well as for his fellow warriors who are the forum."

The authors' devotion to sharing hard-earned knowledge, and to the belief that people are what constitute an organization, is palpable in the pages of CompanyCommand. It recounts stories of frightened and flummoxed soldiers in Iraq who needed to know how to draft a condolence letter to the family of a fallen comrade, or how to fortify Humvees to protect against the damage of improvised explosive devices. Those who came with questions found answers.

CompanyCommand, the online forum, has created friendships among officers who've never met. It has spawned book clubs. Before leaving for combat, members of Allen's and Burgess' old unit, the 25th Infantry Division, read Ahmed Rashid's indispensable chronicle of fundamentalist Afghanistan, Taliban, Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (Yale University Press, 2001). "Our intent was for the key leaders in the battery to hear, smell, taste and touch a small part of where we were going," says a soldier identified in the book as Todd. The club also invited an Islamic scholar.

Despite the fears of Army brass that their soldiers' training would fall short, a funny thing happened on the way to the war: The soldiers got smarter. Then something else happened: The Army noticed.

Today, CompanyCommand and about a half dozen more online forums are being incorporated into the Army's knowledge management initiative-a broad, ambitious and untested attempt to harness in writing the expertise of its employees. The networks have caught the Army's attention at the highest levels and are changing the way soldiers learn, says Marlu Vance, the Army chief information officer's division chief for knowledge management.

"The Army has been very slow in the past . . . in establishing tactics and procedures," Vance says. "But with these nets that have been stood up in the desert by men and women fighting war, the time has just been shrunk to minutes."

For an organization founded on discipline and hierarchy, letting sensitive tactics seep into the public domain, where adversaries could read them and where leaders can't control them, may strike some as foolish. But the opposite is true now, according to Vance. "We're being very careful to ensure that we don't create any situation where you're starting to shut these things down," she says. CompanyCommand and similar sites have been moved to a ".mil" domain to protect information from falling into enemy hands, but members are free to post information, ask questions and answer as candidly as they did when Allen and Burgess launched their virtual front porch.

The Army has a practice of adopting technology early if it affords an edge in war. In that sense, CompanyCommand is a battlefield asset, and one the service is keen to support. This is especially true in the midst of its "transformation" to network-centric warfare, a state in which the force is more agile, lethal and quicker to respond to threats. Just a casual read of CompanyCommand reveals talk of "high trust relationships" among members, the creation of "informal networks" that can "respond quickly and effectively." The Web site, in bucking hierarchy and process, behaves like a true network. Considering that the Army's modern enemies-insurgents and terrorists-are networks themselves, the timing is fortuitous.