Problems with Army PME

I've written several times about my dissatisfaction with the intellectual climate at Squadron Officer's School, the Air Force's Professional Military Education course for captains. Apparently, the Air Force isn't the only service with stagnant PME courses. Small Wars Journal has an article this morning by Army Capt Crispin Burke, titled Sorry, Pentathlete Wasn't on the Syllabus. Burke laments the antiquated exercises at the Aviation Captain's Career Course, which focus on Fulda Gap-style conventional battles and neglect counterinsurgency and the political, economic, and social dimensions of warfare. Apparently the Army's newfound intellectual rigor has yet to penetrate many places.

Yingling Strikes Again

Tom Ricks has posted the transcript of Lt Col Paul Yinging's excellent talk at Quantico about military leadership and adaptation. The talk emphasizes why the military adapts so well on the battlefield, while the institutional military at home does not. At home, bureaucratic inertia pressures officers towards conformity with the status quo. On the battlefield, soldiers adapt or die.

At my previous flying assignment I worked as a Flight Safety Officer (FSO), managing mishap prevention programs, investigating mishaps, and pushing fixes to equipment, training and processes to improve flight safety. I loved the job, because Flight Safety is a highly effective organizational learning process that protects lives. However, even in such a critical field as Flight Safety, organizational learning tends to happen in the wake of costly accidents. The safety community calls this "blood priority", and it squares neatly with what Lt Col Yingling said. When things are going well, it's difficult to build the momentum to enact organizational reforms. However, when a fatal or costly mishap occurs, it's amazing how fast the bureaucracy will jump.

At a larger level, this is why I believe the Air Force has been so slow to recognize and institutionalize the importance of counterinsurgency. The blood priority mostly lies with deployed soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lt Col Yingling argues the institutionalized Army is shielded from these high stakes, and I'd say the same thing is largely true for the Air Force. The Air Force has participated extensively in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it bears few costs for clinging to outdated mindsets. For example, a strategy that overrelies on air strikes might bear long-term adverse consequences (something that has arguably happened in Afghanistan), but it won't cause Air Force casualties. Air Force PME schools (especially at the junior level) that fail to teach counterinsurgency won't cause a crisis of incompetence on the battlefield; Air Force personnel will continue to operate with excellence and effectiveness at the tactical level. The damage done by a stagnant intellectual environment is far more insidious, and doesn't usually threaten the status quo strongly enough to evoke reformation.

But back to Yingling. His recommendations are a good start, but they are not specific. The discussion needs to go on. Lt Col Yingling has set the stage for a long conversation all the services (as well as relevant civilian agencies) should be having.

Crowdsourcing to Boost the Developing World

Technology Review published an article a couple days ago called Crowdsourcing the World, about a project that would outsource certain types of work to the developing world using mobile phones. The article says:

Now Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, is launching a project similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk but that distributes tasks via cell phones. The goal of his project, called txteagle, is to leverage an underused work force in some of the poorest parts of the world.

Eagle says that distributing questions to participants in such developing countries via text messages or audio clips could make certain tasks more economical, such as the translation of documents into other languages, or rating the local relevance of search results. It could also provide a welcome source of income for those involved.

This is the kind of project I love. The American Way of Saving the World is to implement grandiose, top-down plans with giant footprints, soaring budgets, and cumbersome bureaucracies, but the most effective means of building societies are often organic grassroots projects. Countries generally flourish when they empower their citizens to express their creativity, talent, and hard work in economically meaningful ways. I love seeing projects that empower citizens to develop their countries from the bottom up. That's exactly what this project does: it allows citizens of the poorest countries to bring their unique skills, such as their language, into the global marketplace.

The Economist has printed many stories in the past few years about the promise of mobile phones for empowering citizens, improving the efficiency of both business and aid, and ultimately alleviating poverty. More than 3.3 billion phones are in existence (over half the world's population), and one study forecasts global penetration of mobile phones to reach 75% by 2011. Mobile phones allow geographically separated villages and towns to integrate markets and better match supply and demand. They can connect aid donors, recipients, and governments. They can even be used for early warning systems for national disasters. Mobile phones also provide even the most remote villages with a link to the world.

Now we can add the txteagle project to the benefits. If the project works, it will make markets more efficient for everybody, tap into a vast reservoir of global talent, and provide a means of income for citizens of the developing world. I wish Nathan Eagle the best, and am eager to see what fruit the project bears.

A Map of Iran's Blogosphere

I found this report linked on the Wikinomics blog. John Kelly and Bruce Etling of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society wrote a paper called Mapping Iran's Online Public. The report "analyzes the composition of the Iranian blogosphere and its possible impact on political and democratic processes."

This is what the Iranian blogosphere looks like:



I'm a fan of robust civic society wherever it can be found, so it's encouraging to see so much blogging activity in Iran. The authors write, "Given the repressive media environment in Iran today, blogs may represent the most open public communications platform for political discourse. The peer-to-peer architecture of the blogosphere is more resistant to capture or control by the state than the older, hub and spoke architecture of the mass media model."

Coping with the Velocity of Change

In an attempt to become more cultured, my wife and I have taken advantage of our Netflix subscription to order some award-winning documentaries. The first arrived last weekend: Up the Yangtze, a fascinating and beautiful film about the human impact of China's Three Gorges Dam. The 600 ft dam is the largest in the world, and the kind of gargantuan spectacle that China seems to love. While it will undoubtedly bring immense benefits to China, the dam's construction has been steeped in controversy for its environmental and human impact. Over 1 million people had to be relocated by the Chinese government.

This film depicts a China at a crossroads between its rural, traditional past and a cutting-edge future in a globalized world. It follows a cruise boat, staffed by young Chinese workers and catering to rich Western tourists, up the Yangtze River. This juxtaposition between cultures is mirrored in the settlements along the Yangtze. Poor villages that will soon be drowned coexist alongside the skyscrapers and blazing neon of Westernized cities. Progress, we see, is changing everyone and everything. Most Chinese are simply trying to hold on. One review perfectly captures the tone of the film in a single line: "As we watch the steadily rising water swallow more and more of the landscape, the film conveys an ominous sense of a society changing too fast in its stampede into an unknown future."

The film touches on broader questions of "progress." I am a believer in the power of globalization and economic development to eradicate poverty, promote security and cooperation, and improve the quality of life for people all over the world, but globalization has to be managed. Change--even for the better--always has costs. Some people profit from change. Others lose. This is every bit as true within America as it is in the world abroad. A key challenge for policymakers is to help globalization's losers adapt to a changing world. If they cannot adapt, their discontent can undermine the entire system. This challenge is compounded by the increasing velocity of change. Better technology, better methods of communication and transformation, and more competitive economies mean that change happens much faster now than in the past. The pace of development in China, for example, is truly astonishing. But as Up the Yangtze shows, that development has a human price tag. It's good to remember that.

The Air Force, Conservatives & Crusaders

This morning I came across this article by Michael Noonan at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. Next-War-Itis, This-War-Itis, and the American Military mostly covers familiar territory, framed around Bacevich's Atlantic Monthly article on Crusaders and Conservatives, but it has one section I found helpful: a breakdown of how each service has been affected by the Crusader-Conservative debate (which Noonan reworks into a framework of traditionalists, transitionalists, and modernists). This is what Noonan writes about the Air Force:

The Air Force of the four services seems least affected by the turbulence over its professional conception. While the scale of activities have shifted from the Cold War days, particular for its strategic forces, the aerospace service still provides the same essential goods: control of the skies, strikes, and transport. Still, its traditionalists hold most dearly to aerospace supremacy (which is a vital mission) and the efficacy of air strikes to solve complex problems. The transitionalists came of age in a period where humanitarian aid missions were seen as a useful adjunct to traditional roles. Modernists, while still clinging to many precepts of the dominant professional views, seem more sanguine about the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned combat vehicles (UCAVs; e.g., armed Predators), working on the ground with the sister services, and are not as invested in the idea that the air arm can solely determine outcomes.

I think that's a fair, if brief, summary of the Air Force as I see it. My biggest concern--and the reason I frequently challenge the Air Force on this blog--is that its organizational culture is still very much dominated by the traditionalist mindset. In my experience, doctrine, PME, and conversations around the squadron bar all generally reflect a traditionalist mindset. The Air Force needs to stir up more introspective discussion and encourage its officers to question conventional wisdom.

With that said, despite the prevailing organizational culture, the Air Force still has many sharp leaders who understand the complex nature of irregular and hybrid wars, and are working hard to meet modern challenges. I'm always happy when I see the Air Force doing things right, which is why I can heartily recommend this interview with Lt. Gen. David Deptula, the USAF Deputy Chief of Staff for ISR. His answers on ISR, UAVs, and future threats are clear and sensible, and are fully on board with what Secretary Gates has been saying about a balanced strategy.

As a side note, General Schwartz (AF Chief of Staff) is another leader who I'm deeply impressed with. I saw him speak at a conference in 2005 when he was commander of US Transportation Command. This was during a low point in my career, when Iraq was spiraling out of control, I was hearing a lot of things that didn't make sense from military leadership, and I was experiencing a crisis of confidence. Of all the prominent leaders I saw at the conference, Schwartz left the biggest impression on me. His professionalism was impeccable. He was realistic and knowledgeable about the seriousness of our problems in Iraq, but he was fully dedicated to fighting on, rising to seemingly impossible challenges because that's what our country had asked us to do. He expected no less from the aircrew he was addressing, despite a crushing ops tempo with no end in sight. I trusted him. I still do. I'm pleased with what I've seen and heard, and believe the Air Force is on the right track, even if it has some distance to go.

The Air Force Message We Need

In a December 17th speech at the Maneuver Captain's Career Course, John Nagl did something I consider extraordinary. After congratulating the students on their battlefield adaptation to challenges the Army never prepared them for, and after expressing his confidence in their future leadership, he made a request. "I ask that you help us build the Army we need to fight the wars of today and tomorrow."

I will quote his speech at length, because I believe it's that important:

In between combat patrols and meetings with village elders and local security forces, I’m asking you to think about what you need to do your job better. What can we back here do to help you build strong local and provincial governments that meet the needs of their people and gain their support? What organizational changes should we implement to give the companies on the ground what they need to understand and influence the local situation, from a company intel section in the TO&E so that you don’t have to make one out of hide to a battalion Political Advisor to help with negotiations and tribal dynamics? What doctrine or training did you not receive here in the training base that would have helped you more effectively build the Afghan National Army into a force that can secure Afghanistan on its own, so that my son and yours don’t have to do so?

Your nation needs you to lead soldiers into harm’s way to fight a determined and often invisible enemy who knows no laws of war or man. Your nation needs you to be a diplomat as well as a warrior, because we can’t kill or capture our way to success in this fight; victory comes from building local institutions that can stand on their own. But your nation also needs you to tell us what you need to fight your fight better, to build an Army that is truly a learning institution able to defeat adaptive insurgent enemies.

So don’t throw your books away at the end of the course. Take ‘em with you—your Galula, your FM 3-0 and 3-07 and yes, your FM 3-24--and tear ‘em apart. Tell us what we got right and what we got wrong. Tell us over email distro lists that you send to everybody in your small group and by blogging at Small Wars Journal, that gift to the American military that every soldier should read every day, and by publishing in your branch journals and in Military Review. Think and read and publish, when you’re in the fight and, in some ways even harder, when you’re back here after the fight, once the kids are in bed.

I want to throw down the gauntlet for my own service, the Air Force. This is your chance. The Army is reinventing itself as an adaptive learning organization that empowers and learns from anyone willing to speak up--even its most junior officers. The Air Force needs to do the same thing. In 2007 Lieutenant General Stephen Lorenz, commander of Air University, urged airmen to “challenge accepted paradigms to propose new ways of fighting from air, space, and cyberspace.” That's a start, but we have a long way to go.

The organizational learning process in the Air Force is largely stalled, especially at junior levels. In 2007 my Squadron Officer School correspondence curriculum mentioned the word "counterinsurgency" only one time I could find; the in-residence course hardly mentioned it at all. The intellectual environment of the in-residence course is stagnant. It indoctrinates its captains with the existing body of airpower doctrine--which is largely derived from DESERT STORM--and actively discourages critical thinking. When I attended in the summer of 2007, the course included two writing assignments. The first was a paper discussing techniques to keep a failing Officer's Club open. Six years into a grueling war that requires learning and adaptation, it's unforgivable that half our writing at an Air Force PME school was devoted to the Club. Worse, students had to follow a sentence-by-sentence outline provided by the faculty. The last time I wrote an essay in such a rigid format was in 9th grade. The second paper, thankfully, was a country report discussing American interests and security issues in that country. The problem was that students had to fit their report into a rigid framework taught by the school. The framework denied space for intellectual exploration and fresh, original thinking. It also meant every report inclined towards certain kinds of answers.

When I raised my feedback up the SOS chain, I was told that intellectual creativity simply wasn't an emphasis at SOS; the goal of the papers was to learn writing skills. Granted, SOS is primarily a leadership school, not an academic school. I was assured I would find the academics stronger at ACSC. Perhaps, but when is the right time to begin encouraging innovation? To quote Paul Yingling, "It is unreasonable to expect that an officer who spends 25 years conforming to institutional expectations will emerge as an innovator in his late forties."

The Air Force is also largely absent from the dynamic, creative exchanges about strategy and transformation on websites like Small Wars Journal, which has become an intellectual powerhouse in the Army and Marines. Only a handful of Air Force officers regularly engage with this community, like Maj. John Bellflower, who has written a couple articles suggesting ways to employ "soft" airpower successfully in small wars. When it comes to blogging in general, the Air Force lags behind the other services. Most blogs are still banned on Air Force networks. Reversing some of these policies and encouraging officers to join the lively strategic conversations in the Army and Marines would be a good place to start.

It's true that the Army has a ways to go. My Army classmates at DLI assure me that organizational learning has not yet penetrated vast swaths of the Army, and Tom Ricks is writing about the stifling of intellectual freedom at the Army War College. It's also true that in many areas, the Air Force is learning and evolving. The Air Force deserves credit for that. Nevertheless, I believe there is a marked difference between the intellectual climate in the Army and Air Force right now, particularly at the strategic level. Contrast Nagl's message about organizational learning to the implicit message I received at Squadron Officer School. Which organization is doing a better job equipping its captains to lead the Armed Forces into an uncertain future?

So with a nod to John Nagl and plenty of shameless plagiarizing, here is my suggestion for the message the Air Force should deliver to its officers of every rank:

We've done a good job teaching you about airpower; but we need more. We need you to go out and learn about war in its entirety. Burn the midnight oil learning all you can about history, foreign affairs, strategy, and culture and language. Brainstorm ideas. Consider how the Air Force should adapt to our fast-changing world, and how it can more effectively participate in a full range of conflicts, from stability operations to counterinsurgency to conventional wars. Do this jointly. For decades, the Air Force has largely defined itself in opposition to ground forces. It's time to get past that. We're an established service with a lot to offer, and we can stand on our own. So go talk to the Army and Marines. Learn from them. Challenge them. Read and think over the new Army manuals alongside the Air Force's recent Irregular Warfare manual. Hang out on Small Wars Journal and the other good blogs. Read journals across all the services--and from outside the military as well. Join the conversation. When you think others are wrong, call them on it. When you think they're right, bring the lessons back to the Air Force. To meet 21st century challenges, we need to think, challenge each other, and innovate as a joint team.

Just my humble view about the Air Force message we need.

Messy Options in Gaza

It's been a disheartening week, watching the violence continue to unfold between Gaza and Israel. I've been addicted to the news and blogs, trying to make sense of the operation and its ramifications for the region. If my career continues on its current trajectory, it's possible I will be a Middle East policy adviser before too many years. Events like these give me a lot to brood over. If I was asked, what advice would I dare give my leaders?

The problem with foreign policy is that there are frequently no clear solutions to problems, and policymakers must muddle their way through bleak alternatives. Experts seldom agree with each other on the right way forward. This is especially true when it comes to Israel-Palestine, where everybody has a passionate opinion and interpretations of the conflict vary so widely.

One school of thought insists that the only long-term solution is a final negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Daniel Klaidman at Newsweek presents a succinct summary of where the peace process is at, and what a final agreement might look like. According to this school, the immediate task at hand is to negotiate a truce between Hamas and Israel and end the violence in Gaza, and find a way to get all players back into a long-term peace process. This short-term need is addressed in International Crisis Group's report Ending the War in Gaza.

A second school of thought argues that the peace process is a myth; Israel and the Palestinians are at war. Anne Applebaum argues this in The Washington Post. This reminds me of an article I read in a Conflict Resolution class, titled "The Curse of Inconclusive Intervention" by Edward Luttak. His thesis is essentially that wars need to blow themselves out; either one side needs to win decisively, or both sides need to so thoroughly weary themselves of fighting that they agree to negotiate an end. Outside interventions do not change the underlying problems or decisively end wars, so they inadvertently prolong conflicts. This school says that Israelis and Palestinians will continue to fight until one side actually wins (if that's possible) or until both sides are so sick of fighting that they mutually agree to sit down and have meaningful negotiations.

Of course, these are just two out of many different frameworks for viewing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and all the main ideas have infinitesimal variations.

Regardless of which of these alternative frameworks provides the best way forward, I stand by my thesis in my Israel-Palestine Through a COIN Lens post that Israel seems to be operating in a strategic vacuum. Several readers criticized my idea that population-centric COIN can apply in Gaza; a number expressed doubt that "hearts and minds" has any relevance in such a radicalized population. But Israel still has to wrestle with a terribly difficult question: if it weakens or crushes Hamas, who will rule Gaza in its place? Israel does not want to reoccupy Gaza. The ideal alternative (if it can be called that) seems to be restoring Palestinian unity under Fatah, but Israel's tactical victories in Gaza are devastating Mahmoud Abbas' legitimacy. Without a viable alternative to Hamas, Gazas may continue to give the movement their loyalty.

Crisis Group seems to share this concern. They write, "... Gazans of all political stripes believe that Israel is targeting civilians to turn them against the Islamic movement. They also think that any success in this regard likely will be shortlived, since when the dust clears, Hamas will still hold valuable cards: its religious appeal, its history of steadfastness against the occupation and most importantly, the lack of a viable alternative to their rule in Gaza and, more broadly, of any prospect for a viable peace with Israel."

Abu Aardvark gave me more reason for concern with his troubling post about Israel's self-admitted lack of strategic goals. After a lecture with Israel's ambassador to the US, Abu Aardvark wrote, "If Meridor is taken at his word, then Israel has no strategy in Gaza." When asked repeatedly about Israel's desired end state in Gaza, Meridor fell back on body counts and numbers of targets hit. I don't take that as a good sign.

If there is anything close to a consensus in all the articles I've read, it's that these are bleak times for Israel and Palestine. Many commentators feel Israel had no choice but to confront Hamas now, but few see room for optimism on the road ahead.

Preparing for Networks of the Future

THE CHANGING NATURE OF THE NETWORK

In the TV show Battlestar Galactica, Admiral Adama strictly forbids the networking of computer devices on the Galactica because he's so concerned about the security threat. In the show, Adama's paranoia pays off; the Galactica evades a network intrusion that cripples the rest of the fleet. I sometimes wonder if the US military is headed this direction.

The military (I'm assuming like most corporations) seems to view its network as a fixed collection of PCs, running standardized configurations and fixed lists of major software applications that are approved by higher headquarters. At McChord, this meant hundreds of similar desktops running Microsoft Office, Adobe Acrobat Reader, Internet Explorer, etc. Some commanders had BlackBerries, and some people had laptops that could log into the network. If you wanted to tinker with anything or install a new program, you had to consult a large IT bureaucracy. Again, while I have no experience in the business world, I imagine a lot of this is fairly standard.

The problem is that I don't think this paradigm will be useful much longer. Read Nova Spivack's article The Future of the Desktop.

First, hardware. The network is no longer just PCs; it's everything. Today mobile phones, video game consoles, home entertainment systems, security and traffic cameras, and other consumer electronics can access the Internet. I fully expect to see household appliances, vehicles, and a greater variety of consumer electronics integrated into networks in the near future. At the military level, virtually any piece of hardware could conceivably be networked. It doesn't make sense to continue defining a network primarily as a collection of PCs.

Second, the client-server relationship. Data is migrating off of personal computers and into the "cloud." Vista was probably the last operating system as we know it. In the future our data will likely be stored on networks instead of local hard drives, and we will tend to use web services rather than locally installed software.

Third, software. The software industry is no longer dominated by a handful of monolithic companies who release a fixed list of products that are installed on your local desktop (i.e. Office, PhotoShop, etc.). Yes, we still rely on these titans, but we also have hundreds of software applications written by smaller companies, open source software like FireFox and OpenOffice, and online applications like Google Docs. The variety of software applications is staggering, and development is only accelerating. A centralized IT bureaucracy cannot possibly keep up, reviewing and authorizing which programs to allow.

THE GROWING CAPABILITIES GAP

The result of these three trends is that a gap is growing between network capabilities and the network the military is actually using. Writing solely from my experience as a user, I can cite a number of personal examples where the old paradigm is showing its age.

- Military members must take a large volume of Computer Based Training lessons each year, which are delivered over the web. A number of our computers couldn't use the web services to access the training, because the most recent version of Flash or Shockwave wasn't installed, and it was a hassle to track down IT folks with priviliges to install software.

- When I wrote my program interfacing DOD mission planning software with Google Earth, there was no realistic way to get the program approved by the IT bureaucracy. Furthermore, our IT office could not install Google Earth because it was not on the MAJCOM approved software list. We got around this by running both programs from a thumb drive, instead of installing them. In other words, productivity and innovation required breaking rules.

- Using FireFox language translation plugins I can read Arabic news probably 5 times faster than I can in Internet Explorer, because I can look up words on the fly without shuffling through a dictionary. I use FireFox extensively at home, so I'm learning media arabic much quicker than my classmates. I would love to bring FireFox into the classroom to make our class hours more productive, but getting FireFox installed on the DLI network (let alone the plugins) would be an enormous bureaucratic battle I don't have time for, and I would probably lose.

- My school at DLI has tried mandating that we use Tablet PCs that they issue, and forbidding the use of personal PCs in the classroom. The problem is that the tablets fall under the same IT rules as the government network; they're older and slower than my computer and are pre-installed with outdated software. When one of my classmates approached the IT office about installing the most recent version of our Arabic flashcard software (which is vital!), he was told that wasn't possible.

Enough ranting. My point is that a highly regulated, centralized IT bureaucracy has created a vast gap between military networks and the network capabilities you find in the civilian world. I prefer to do all possible work on my personal computer now. It's simply much more powerful. And with the military's thumb drive ban, it's so difficult to pass information that I prefer to avoid the government network altogether.

WAYS FORWARD?

Military networks need security. I understand that. The statistics about hacking attempts in DOD computers are really astonishing, and the virus that prompted the thumb drive ban sounded severe. Our networks need strict security controls, which will always be at odds with the spirit of openness that makes the Internet so powerful. How do we strike a balance? I wish I knew. I'm sure a lot of people way smarter than me are debating that.

My one feeble suggestion is that our computer networks might reflect the duality that I wrote about yesterday: top-down centralized control in places, and bottom-up decentralized openness in others. The secure, protected military network could coexist side-by-side with a more open network. It would be somewhat analogous to SIPRNET and NIPRNET. We could have SIPRNET for classified government business, NIPRNET for unclassified but sensitive government business, and a public network you can hook up to with your laptop, iPhone, or PSP and use however you wish.

I can't think of any reason why every military base in the country should not have public Wi-Fi access, identical to what you'd find at home or at Starbucks. It's absurd how slow Wi-Fi implementation has been. With $1000, a trip to BestBuy, and a phone call to AT&T, I could put Wi-Fi in every classroom in my Arabic school. That would unlock a world of Arabic resources. When I spent time at Manas AB in Kyrgyzstan and Ali Al Salem AB in Kuwait, the base networks were so heavily firewalled that they were almost useless. At Ali, most reputable news sources were blocked. Predictably, the base coffee shops--which had their private, unfiltered Internet access--swelled with airmen and soldiers who were willing to pay. There's no reason the military shouldn't provide this service on its own dime. This public, open access to the Internet could exist side-by-side with a secure, centrally-controlled network for government business.

One last analogy. When I flew C-17s, I had every state-of-the-art radio available that you could imagine. Multiple UHF and VHF radios, long-range HF, SATCOM, secure, anti-jamming, even text messaging. Those radios all had their uses. All were important. But one of the most important resources in my possession was my personal cell phone. At least in the US, my ancient $50 Sprint phone gave me more networking capability than my $200 million aircraft. C-17 crewmembers, who have to network with more agencies than you realize--command & control, passenger terminals, flight planners, maintenance, flight kitchen, customs, billeting, etc.--use cell phones so often that it's hard to imagine life without them. There is nothing secure about them, and we were always careful not to violate OPSEC, but they coexisted with our expensive secure communications equipment. Both had their place.