When trash bins overflowed at Fort Liberty and continued to pile up for weeks last winter, soldiers at the North Carolina Army base sent photos to a soldier-run Instagram account to highlight the unsightly issue. Comments flooded in, many of them jokes at the Army’s expense. Within days of that initial social media post, which prompted news coverage, base officials responded and the garbage was removed.
The de facto smoke pit of the digital era, social media in the military has long been a gathering place for service members and veterans. But it’s also a tool of last resort for rank-and-file troops who feel that the only way to fix a problem they’re facing is to post about it publicly and break with a longstanding cultural norm in the military to keep issues in-house.
The Army, as an institution, has seen social media as a crucial recruiting tool in recent years, but when it comes to how the branch uses these platforms to engage with its own members, some current and former soldiers say the strategy is unclear at best and adversarial at worst. Recently, Army leaders have been reluctant to embrace newer forms of media as a way to receive feedback from soldiers. Instead, the preference, and oft-repeated talking point, has been that soldiers should run their problems through their chain of command.
Where Army leaders are missing the mark, critics say, is in not investigating why some soldiers today feel they need to raise these concerns in online forums like Reddit, or community pages on Facebook and Instagram, and on other platforms and apps.
Communities like U.S Army W.T.F! Moments, whose Facebook page boasts a digital audience of 1.6 million followers and more than 2 million daily viewers, and the Army and Military Reddit forums, with audiences of 315,000 and 488,000 members, respectively, “would not be needed if the official channels worked,” said Ken Ramos, a retired psychological operations sergeant major and admin for U.S Army W.T.F! Moments.
Over the last few years, soldiers have used social media to shed light on quality-of-life issues they faced while living in military-owned and operated housing. Their concerns were confirmed by a September 2023 federal watchdog report which found “serious health and safety risks” in the barracks ranging from mold and rat infestations causing junior enlisted troops to feel “expendable.” Other problems ranged from broken locks to malfunctioning security cameras which left some feeling vulnerable to sexual assault and break-ins — an issue brought up in the October arrest of a soldier for a string of break-ins and sexual assaults that occurred at a Fort Cavazos, Texas barracks. The watchdog report caught the attention of Congress, which stood up a panel to improve troop housing and dining on base, with the idea that it would help with recruiting and retention problems.
The laundry list of quality-of-life issues even led Rob Evans, a former Army sergeant in the Reserve and National Guard, to create a Yelp-like app called Hots&Cots to give junior enlisted troops a way to flag issues at base dining facilities or in their barracks — places their leaders rarely visit.
During a roundtable with a handful of reporters at the October 2024 Association of the United States Army conference in Washington D.C., Task & Purpose asked Lt. Gen. Omar Jones, head of Army Installation Management Command if he knew of Hots&Cots. Jones said he was aware of the app but does not pay it much attention.
“I empathize with why service members and their families may choose to use alternate channels to seek assistance when they feel unheard,” Jones said in a statement after the roundtable, adding that soldiers need to use their chains of command and submit work order requests through official channels like the Defense Department-wide Interactive Customer Evaluation, ICE, and the Army Maintenance Activity, ARMA, portals. He emphasized that using official channels puts information into a database that his team can “track and follow up on” and helps leadership hold “housing providers and ourselves accountable.”
The Army’s “preference” is that soldiers bring their concerns to their chain of command and take advantage of open door policies, which are designed by each commander, Heather Hagan, spokesperson for the service said in a statement to Task & Purpose. According to Army command policy regulation, open door policies put the onus on soldiers to make leadership aware of any personal or professional problems that a soldier “has been unable to resolve,” and require commanders to notify soldiers about their specific policy.
“Any issue or accusation worth bringing to the attention of millions of people outside the organization should first be brought to the chain of command’s attention,” Hagan said. “If soldiers are concerned about retaliation or getting in trouble for reporting an issue, there are many anonymous ways they can report them to their leaders.”
The tension highlights an issue at the heart of the Army and broader military’s struggle with new media platforms — an old guard mentality to the way troops talk about issues they’re dealing with. Evans, with his app, said he’s not trying to “circumvent” Army processes but “supplement” those official channels, adding that “there are ways to engage with junior enlisted that I think those other components are missing.” For example, there are certain features that Hots&Cots has that official reporting systems, such as ICE, do not have — like the ability to include photos and videos in a submission, he said.
“To be very frank, it needs to be updated. It’s a pretty old and outdated site,” Evans said. “I would be curious to know how many of the higher leaders actually have tried to utilize it and navigate ICE to file an issue and what their experience has been like.”
Hagan said that social media can bring “new ideas and solutions to the forefront” but emphasized that “engaged leaders” are the most effective resource.
When a siloed community goes public
All ranks of the enlisted and officer corps have turned to online platforms to commiserate about quality-of-life issues or even reached out to online communities on Reddit on issues as serious as mental health and suicide.
Evans called social media “the new water cooler” for soldiers — a forum where they can talk or complain about issues central to rank-and-file life. Online communities, like the popular Army and Military Reddit pages, are giving them a sense of community in a world that can be both lonely, and incredibly strict, with military regulations dictating everything from what to wear, to how exactly to clean and keep one’s barracks room, to what you can and can’t do in your free time.
“People can feel very isolated even in the barracks,” said a former military intelligence NCO who helps moderate the Army Reddit page, adding that soldiers from multiple units can live in the same barracks “which means you might not live in a building with anyone you work with.”
The written and unwritten layered social dynamics underpinning military life add to the challenges of building community, he said. The Army’s fraternization regulation requires that soldiers avoid “undue familiarity” between those of significantly different rank and warns that “even one instance of such behavior” like visiting bars, nightclubs, eating establishments, or each other’s homes outside of work-related social gatherings “could amount to undue familiarity.”
“If you’re a first sergeant, how many first sergeants are on that base? How many people are you allowed by reg to be friends with?” the Reddit moderator said. “Same thing for officers. In a standard company, you’re gonna have for each platoon an XO [executive officer] and the commander. You might not be drinking buddies with your commander so you’ve got like three other lieutenants. I hope you like those three people. Otherwise you have no one to socialize with.”
The U.S Army W.T.F! Moments Facebook page has a mix of service members, veterans and military families that make up its audience. While the majority of traffic used to “be just a bunch of joes complaining about, ‘oh, they’re making me work late!’” Ramos said, now he’s getting a lot more inbox traffic from leaders like chiefs of staff or brigade commanders who are asking moderators for insight or help on issues impacting their soldiers.
“It’s because they don’t want to admit that there’s a problem in the organization from their bosses — that’s what it is,” Ramos said. “I totally understand a lieutenant colonel does not want to piss off his rater.”
When rants get results
As with any aspect of the military, a unit or service’s culture is heavily influenced by a commander’s personality. Some leaders have been more willing to embrace and leverage non-traditional online spaces. During his tenure, former Sgt. Maj. of the Army Michael “Tony” Grinston and his public affairs team hosted town halls on Reddit to hear from soldiers and in one instance helped an Army couple squash an almost $600,000 medical bill they received for their newborn daughter’s civilian health care while having military-provided health insurance.
Grinston’s former spokesperson, Master Sgt. Will Reinier, said that in a “perfect world” soldiers turn to their chain of command but sometimes “the soldier can feel like they’re on an island and they don’t have anyone else to turn to.” In those situations, they may look to online communities for advice, answers to rudimentary questions or if their immediate superior doesn’t “have the experience or ability to resolve an issue,” he said.
“[Grinston] was not asking to replace anybody’s chain of command but we did notice that the reality of it was that there were a lot of soldiers posting their issues on social media platforms and not taking into account their chain of command,” Reinier said. “His guidance was essentially: It doesn’t matter if it’s online or in person, if the soldier’s having a problem, we need to try to figure out what the problem is and then be able to connect them with a leader who can help.”
For issues with the barracks or base dining facilities, Evans said soldiers have moved away from submitting formal work orders and requests because they have “lost faith in the system and getting issues resolved.”
He gave the example of one soldier who was told by the Department of Public Works, which responds to barracks work orders, “to go spray bleach on the mold” and clean it themselves. The Environmental Protection Agency however, Evans noted, does not recommend using bleach to address mold.
But with the help of his app, Evans has developed informal working relationships with several bases where complaints on Hots&Cots led to an immediate fix for situations where help seemed out of reach or newer programs with growing pains were improved — like at Fort Carson, Colorado’s dining facility.
Responding to complaints about a lack of healthy food options for soldiers leaving work after normal business hours, the base introduced grab-and-go kiosks. In recent months, photos posted to Hots&Cots, and elsewhere on social media, highlighted the kiosks’ barren shelves. In response to the attention, base officials began working with moderators from Hots&Cots and Reddit and solved supply chain issues that were causing the lack of food, a Fort Carson official said.
There were also growing pains that came with introducing a new meal option for soldiers. At the kiosks, soldiers are able to use their meal cards to buy one item from each category: Entree, sides, snacks, dairy, dessert and beverages. Moderators from Reddit saw comments from soldiers about not being able to get milk and yogurt or cheese at the same time because both fell under the dairy category.
“I alerted the team to it. No one had ever made that complaint and so we got that resolved,” the Fort Carson official said. “We were able to leverage the feedback that Rob was getting and action it for the benefit of the soldiers.”
Quality-of-life issues are personal for Evans but he sees it as an important problem that fell by the wayside during the military’s focus on readiness and strategy over the last two decades fighting wars abroad. Now, it’s seen by Defense Department officials and Congress as a roadblock hampering recruiting and retention as the services deal with the toughest recruiting environment in generations.
“There was a part of my life that we didn’t have running water in our house or I had food insecurities and I had cockroaches in my house. Part of me joining the military was to improve my life to get away from that stuff. I’m sure I’m not the only one,” Evans said. “When you join the military expecting a better quality of life and you just kind of get transplanted back into that same situation, you may start questioning, why did I do this for a better quality of life when I’m not really improving it?”
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