Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern War

2023 Gold Medal in Biography/Memoir from the Military Writers Society of America

John Spencer was a new second lieutenant in 2003 when he parachuted into Iraq leading a platoon of infantry soldiers into battle. During that combat tour he learned how important unit cohesion was to surviving a war, both physically and mentally. He observed that this cohesion developed as the soldiers experienced the horrors of combat as a group, spending their downtime together and processing their shared experiences.

When Spencer returned to Iraq five years later to take command of a troubled company, he found that his lessons on how to build unit cohesion were no longer as applicable. Rather than bonding and processing trauma as a group, soldiers now spent their downtime separately, on computers communicating with family back home. Spencer came to see the internet as a threat to unit cohesion, but when he returned home and his wife was deployed, the internet connected him and his children to his wife on a daily basis.

In Connected Soldiers Spencer delivers lessons learned about effective methods for building teams in a way that overcomes the distractions of home and the outside world, without reducing the benefits gained from connections to family.

John Spencer is the chair of Urban Warfare Studies with the Modern War Institute, United States Military Academy. He served twenty-five years in the U.S. Army as an infantry soldier and is a highly decorated combat veteran. Spencer is the host of the Urban Warfare Project podcast, in which he interviews fellow industry experts.