The Army is mobilizing an unlikely weapon—the smartphone.
Beginning in February, the Army will give soldiers their choice of a variety of smartphones, network equipment and applications under the Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications (CSDA) program. The devices will be common consumer phones such as the iPhone, Android, iPad, Kindle and other devices and will be equipped with specialized military applications.
“This isn’t the future. This is now,” said Lt. Col. Greg Motes of the Army Signal Center at Fort Gordon, Ga.
With the move, the Army is opening up the market for specialized military apps it believes will eventually perform numerous functions such as control fighter jets, tanks, missiles and machine guns and be used for facial recognition to spot enemies and fingerprinting to identify prisoners. “All that technology could easily be put into a phone,” Motes said.
The Army has already begun developing applications internally. Last year it sponsored the Apps for Army challenge which gave soldiers and Army civilians a venue to create apps. Col. Motes and his team created several including the “Physical Training Program”.
The Army is also looking for outside help to develop specialized military apps and many contractors are already “chomping at the bit” military officials said. Raytheon has designed a smartphone-like device, the Raytheon Advanced Tactical Systems (RATS), which include apps for maps, communication, collaboration and other features. It includes an app that allows soldiers to take a picture with their phone and send the information to headquarters and other units. Last November, an army unit deployed to Afghanistan used phones loaded with RATS to test the software and Raytheon expects to receive feedback in December.
Other companies have built apps that display video from unmanned aerial vehicles overhead and translate words spoken in English into any language the soldier chooses. Textron developed an “augmented reality” app called Soldier Eyes that lets soldiers see information overlaid on what their smart-phone’s camera sees, as well as gather information in the field and send back to their command stations through a secure cloud.
“We can’t write every app,” Col Motes said. “We need our industry partners.
The Army is currently looking into developing its own application portal, like the iTunes apps store, to guarantee the apps it sanctions are secure and free of viruses or other malicious code.
