Major Emmanuel Chirchir, the Kenyan Army’s spokesman, has used Twitter to give progress updates about the incursion and at times has used Twitter to name certain towns the army would hit next in hopes of protecting citizens.

There’s a question of how effective this is, given Somalia’s access to the Internet is extremely rudimentary. Internet access limited largely to cities and usually confined to Internet cafes because of cost, according to Abdikadir Ahmed, who has worked on Internet freedom issues in Somalia. Ahmed also said that broader use of social media can help Somalia get out of its decades-long conflicts. He says:

Nowadays, mainly in the cities, you will find Internet cafes. Youth are using Facebook and chatting. If someone posts something on Facebook, there are thousands of people who pass it on. We have plenty of news websites, about 700. But when it comes to blogs, it is something new. In Somalia, we have extremists and moderates. … Social blogs can help Somalis come out with peaceful ways for [dealing with] a conflict that’s been going on for more than 20 years.

The ability to identify patterns and trends in social networks could help the arms control verification process. In the most basic sense, social media can draw attention to both routine and abnormal events. We may be able to use data mining to understand where strange effluents are flowing, to recognize patterns of industrial activity, to queue sensors and satellites. Such queuing could help us to make better use of our scarce and expensive National Technical Means, or in some cases to supplement them in important ways. This is a major issue in an age of budget austerity, when the price tag for big hardware like satellites continues to rise. We need this “big hardware”, but we need to use it efficiently.

She pointed to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Red Balloon Challenge in 2009 as an example of how social media had effectively helped the eventual winners find 10 red balloons placed around the world for a $40,000 cash prize.

The State Department website has Gottemoeller’s speech, in text, here.

“The Social Networking Training Course is a proactive approach to information gathering through Social Networks…,” says new announcement. The training, which is scheduled to start at the end of November at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is supposed to include instruction on such areas as “Building and Managing the Social Network.”

But the Army isn’t trying to cull information from social networking sites, like Facebook. Instead, the focus is on understanding and controlling people’s social networks through a variety of techniques, ranging from conducting interviews to collecting biometrics.

Understanding social networks, particularly adversaries’ social networks, is an area of increasing interest to the military, particularly in operations conducted against insurgent and terrorist groups. This training appears to reflect this new analytical approach to intelligence collection.

The goal of the training, says the Army, is to teach ways of “identifying, predicting, and managing adversarial individuals who are not cooperative with military operational interests.”

See the full announcement here.