Many people are practically welded to their phones these days, but I can imagine various ways in which you might not want soldiers to be freely reachable, or able to reach out to others at any time, for fear of critical information being discovered when it isn’t supposed to be. Or even for fear of distraction. Do you want that guy that’s supposed to be on watch spending his time playing games or browsing Tik Tok or something instead?
So, are they allowed to carry personal phones while on duty? Or just instructed to not to use them? Or what?
Yes, often, and ‘what’; that is to say, there are times when military members may be ordered to turn off phones, and of course such devices are not allowed into SCIFs and other secure facilities nor used to transmit official information but there is no general military policy disallowing mobile phone use; this memo is about the extent of formal policy. And yes, it is a problem as are fitness trackers and smartwatches uploading location data to easily hacked, insecure sites and databases.
What do you mean by on duty? There will be different rules for when you’re deployed and when you are in garrison.
The last time I was deployed it was right after the iPhone came out. (God where did the years go?) It wasn’t an issue then. Pretty much no one had smart phones and our phones didn’t work there.
I retired in 2016 and we were National Guard so my experience is different than active duty. I see lots of online discussions about leadership’s over reliance on cell phones for communication with their subordinates. It certainly made things easy for me. If I went to a meeting I could immediately push out the information to everyone
I know nearly zilch about military stuff, but aren’t there times when soldiers are doing what they’ve been ordered to, and other times when they’re ‘off duty’? So there might not be any problem with soldiers chatting with their friends or whatever on those off times, while you don’t want them slacking on painting the rocks white or charging the enemy lines as ordered.
Also recall that Ukrainian intelligence seems to have access to the cell system in hte occupied regions (or did) and was willing to leak all sorts of messages and recorded conversations of Russian soldiers telling folks back home how bad things were. (Plus the wife who messaged her husband to find her a washing machine and big screen TV to loot and send home.)
It’s a job. It’s literally 9-5 most of the time (if you don’t count PT at 6). You also get an hour for lunch usually. Of course there is off time. Again it matters if you are in garrison or deployed.
I mean it’s not like a regular job. There can be times you work 7 days a week. There are times you could work 12-24 hours in a row. For the most part the average soldier in garrison works 9-5ish with an hour or so of PT most of the time. When deployed it really depends on where you are and what the job is.
That’s what I was wondering. There’s an air force base near where I work and we usually have a handful of them stopping in for lunch every day. They all have cell phones that they appear to use just like anyone else. However, I’m not sure it would be considered ‘on duty’ for the purposes of this question. Not only are they not deployed (or at least not out of the country), they’re off the base for and grabbing some lunch.
One thing that isn’t allowed in the Army (god knows what the Air Force allows) is walking and talking on your phone. Sitting down at lunch and using your phone is no problem. To be honest I don’t know if the walking and talking thing is written down anywhere but it’s universal.
This question came to me due to memories of hearing long conversations between my father (ex WWII army officer) and his brother (ex WWII navy officer.) Once the topic of military censorship came up, with Uncle Dave laughing about seeing his wife’s collection of the letters he had sent back to her. Apparently some of them had almost as much text blacked out as still visible – though he swore he was always super careful not to touch on matters that were considered sensitive. My father claimed his letters had much the same appearance, and they joked the censors must have gottem bonuses for how many bottles of the obscuring ink they went through.
Of course, in those days it was only paper mail, and apparently all outgoing mail went through military channels so they had access to it all and apparently enough personnel to read and redact every single letter.
Opportunities to actually call home from the fronts were nearly non-existent. Even years later on, when he was stationed in Japan for a stretch that included when I was born, it was a great privilege and took some special effort for his superiors to make it possible for him to call my mother soon after the birth. On the receiving end, my mother told me the entire maternity ward was all a-twitter at the mere idea that someone was getting a phone call from basically all the way on the other side of the whole planet!
And nowadays, every soldier has a device to send text AND voice AND photos AND even videos from almost everywhere to almost everywhere else 24 hours a day. So I wondered if the military has simply given up the idea of censoring communications from their personnel? Can they possibly have enough censors to be able to do more than sample stuff here and there, maybe from especially sensitive areas or people they have suspicions about for other reasons? Or are they trying to hand the job over to AI bots somehow?
This was, IIRC, one of the arguments against TikTok. Users would watch regularly during free time, even coffe breaks at work. Therefore if the company were collecting geographical information on users (who wouldn’t?) they could see what locations users congrgated in, and correlate those with government installations. “These people work (are seen to be regularly) in the Washington state department offices.” and “these people are in this naval base… and now are at this location overseas”. Plus of course your home address and commute schedule.
Even if you disable access to GPS data, that you are sourced from the same IP wifi as someone who did not turn off GPS access for the app would be a giveaway. Reminds me of the joke about:
“How do you know where to dig for clams?”
“When one sneezes, it gives away the whole lot.”
The thing is " military member" isn’t a job, just a vague description of a huge group of people. If you’re infantry in the middle of combat of course you’re not on phone. If you’re working on Top Secret stuff in a SCIF having your phone can on you can ruin your career. On the flip side, if you’re a finance/personnel troop you’re just working a normal office job and having your phone isn’t an issue. It all depends on what your job is and what you’re doing.
My time in Iraq doesn’t seem that long ago but it’s going on 15 years so my point of reference is old. No one from my unit was killed. When someone was killed or seriously wounded the J6 would immediately shut down all phones and internet to the FOB. People love to spread bad news. If they didn’t shut it down people would be telling their spouses and it would get to the deceased’s family before official notification. The military comes with immediate support that you don’t get when some rando calls you in the middle of the night. I’m sure it happened a few times before they learned.
One of my favorite passages from Catch 22 touches on this…
All the officer patients in the ward were forced to censor letters written by all the enlisted-men patients, who were kept in residence in wards of their own. It was a monotonous job, and Yossarian was disappointed to learn that the lives of enlisted men were only slightly more interesting than the lives of officers. After the first day he had no curiosity at all. To break the monotony he invented games. Death to all modifiers, he declared one day, and out of every letter that passed through his hands went every adverb and every adjective. The next day he made war on articles. He reached a much higher plane of creativity the following day when he blacked out everything in the letters but a, an and the. That erected more dynamic intralinear tensions, he felt, and in just about every case left a message far more universal. Soon he was proscribing parts of salutations and signatures and leaving the text untouched. One time he blacked out all but salutation “Dear Mary” from a letter, and at the bottom he wrote, “I yearn for you tragically, A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.” A.T. Tappman was the group chaplain’s name.