Email-Driven Army

This comment really has little to do with the article, but I thought I’d post it here anyway. I’m amazed at how email-reliant the Army has become. Yesterday, while attempting an upgrade, the server admins knocked out the entire Fort Carson email system and it’s probably going to be out for a few days. You’d think this would only be a slight inconvenience, but that would be a gross understatement. You’d be amazed at how much critical data people have sitting in their inbox and nowhere else. Entire operations halted today as data was lost and/or made temporarily unavailable. People are unable to call others because the only phone directory they ever use is in the email client. It’s really quite amazing the impact this has. I cringe as I watch our organization fall apart for the moment because of a technological failure. I’ve no doubt that email has become more of a crutch than the tool it was intended to be. I’m fairly certain we won WWII without email. It’s funny to watch today’s Army that’s only a fraction of the size of the WWII Army fall to pieces due to an equipment failure. Even funnier is the reluctance of people to actually go and talk to people now that they cannot shout orders over email. You can watch as good leaders hardly notice the outage, but the poor leaders sit in their offices spinning their wheels, desperately waiting for the server to come back on-line. I noticed this same sort of thing at West Point once when all the power was knocked out. People that usually spent hours on-line chatting were suddenly found out wandering the halls and socializing with everyone they knew. It’s just sad in general when you observe a machine controlling someone’s routine. I wish the Army would put some sort of delay on email so that everything you send today wouldn’t show up until tomorrow. If you could get people away from the practice of watching for email in their inbox, I think productivity would drastically increase. But hey, that’s just my opinion.