MINNEAPOLIS — Lynn Clasen's son was wounded in battle in Afghanistan this summer. In some high-tech contact with him as he recovered, Clasen was told that the U.S. Army was sending him back to the combat zone with a broken arm.

"He's instant-messaging and saying he can't even tie his shoes, much less defend himself," Clasen said. "Shame on them. How can they treat their soldiers like this and put them in jeopardy? I'm getting messages from other military moms on the Internet saying, 'Get on the phone and find out what's going on.' "

Through a spokesman, the U.S. Army said Clasen's son is able to handle the physical demands of his mission. But her story reveals an emerging and important truth about today's wired warfare.

While instantaneous global connectedness has transformed communications between soldiers and their families, it has led to new kinds of anxieties for families at home and given the military new concerns.

These are the kinds of concerns that commanders in previous conflicts couldn't have imagined.

"This definitely is not your father's war," said Army Maj. William Willhoite, reached at Central Command in Baghdad, Iraq. "It's all wired. And that brings both benefits and drawbacks."

One of the military's biggest concerns: Today, a soldier's death risks being broadcast to the world long before the military makes its face-to-face visit. "When someone is killed," said Air Force Lt. Col. Ellen Krenke, a Pentagon spokeswoman, "the next of kin really need to know that first — and that's an issue with all this technology."

From a military family's perspective, the intermittent dribble of letters from wars past has been supplanted by a 24-hour tide of information from e-mail and a host of military, news media and other Web sites detailing different missions or events that have happened where a soldier is stationed. Random scraps of misleading information can easily set off alarms.

While the instant communications mean families like Clasen's know their loved ones are still alive, a soldier's cryptic comment about having to go off-line for a few days can scare families back home, who worry about dangerous missions away from the base's computers. Any sudden, unexplained loss of the soldier's Internet service can be unnerving; the military does that when there's a death.

Well-meaning Web sites for military families also can lead to anxiety.

While cruising the Web, Clasen once found her son's name on a list of missing soldiers. She started making calls and asking the other military moms on the e-mail list she's on to find out anything they could. "We were all trying to find T.J.," she said — meaning a network of hundreds of moms, who in two years have sent one another more than 30,000 messages.

Not only is it not your father's war, military families say, but it also isn't even your older brother's war.

"This is a whole other world from what I dealt with in 1991," said Lori Hanley. Her then-husband was in the first Gulf War. "We had a computer; but there was no Internet that we knew about. We communicated only with letters and very occasional phone calls. It was very difficult not knowing what was going on or that he was alive from one day or even week to the next."

At the same time, though, she said, "I'm sure this must be a nightmare for the military. They can't control what's going out."

The official military response: Not a nightmare, exactly, but it does present challenges.

"There's no censorship," Willhoite said. "But commanders are responsible for making sure that all soldiers who have Web sites or blogs are putting on there what we need to put on there. The communication going back and forth is almost instantaneous, but a lot of times soldiers use blogs to vent frustration. Their venting can sound worse than it is."

Clasen hopes her son's position was never as bad as she imagined. Now, she feels better: Her son's unit has been pulled back to its base, allowing her a lot more e-mail contact.