The short of it

The army has selected a dissemination channel whose 140-character brevity it should find comforting. Historically,commanders have favoured terseness because of signals issues semaphore and Morse were just not intuitive and short wave radio was rampantly misunderstood. After ciphers came into common use in World War II,processing and transmission overheads still kept messages short.

The army would be familiar with the atmospherics of Twitter,but can it live up to public expectations on the channel? Perhaps it sees the handle as a one-way radio,a publicity device. But Twitter is actually a multi-threaded conversation in which the whole world and their grandmother is involved and it stays on the record for ever. The army will be replied to,asked questions,pressured,provoked,drawn into conversations in which it would probably like to keep its mouth shut and its powder dry. Because the issues it will be attacked on are political,not military. In fact,the ministry of defence should be talking more here,and the forces should keep it down. For starters,in order to keep the peace,the army really must keep that jaw-breaking Twitter handle out of the hands of General Twit and Major Twit.