US Army to issue Droid dev kit in July

Battle-smartphones go to war in 2013

By Lewis Page • Get more from this author

Posted in Mobile, 20th April 2011 09:46 GMT

The US Army has announced that it will soon throw open an Android dev kit allowing apps to be written for use by soldiers on a variety of combat handsets and devices.

The military Droid framework is known as Mobile/Handheld Computing Environment (CE).

"Using the Mobile /Handheld CE Product Developers Kit, we're going to allow the third-party developers to actually develop capabilities that aren't stovepiped," says Lt-Col Mark Daniels. Daniels is in charge of the Joint Battle Command-Platform (JBC-P) handheld device, which is essentially a military Droid phone: it is expected to be issued to US Army and Marine ground units from 2013.

The colonel says that the mobile/handheld CE dev kit will be released in July. Before that point the Army will develop certain core apps that will come with every handset, to include mapping, so-called Blue Force Tracking (displaying where friendly units are in order to avoid "friendly fire" incidents), TIGR map-marking and messaging. According to Daniels there will also be an address book and OpenOffice for document viewing.

"It's like when you get an iPhone and you have the Apple-made apps: the contacts, the email," says J Tyler Barton, Army app engineer. "Then other applications are free to use those apps, or to go above and beyond that."

The base software is being designed to run on a variety of different Android variants. As to hardware, the JBC-P may be either an existing government off-the-shelf unit or possibly a commercial off-the-shelf buy. It will have a "ruggedised tactical sleeve or case".

Networking will be provided by any of a variety of existing military radios: specifically named are the Joint Tactical Radio System, JTRS Soldier Radio Waveform, Netted Iridium, and the PRC 117G and PRC 152A used by the Marines. The system and its baseline apps are expected to tie in with existing vehicle-mounted and headquarters kit provided under previous command-and-control/blue-force-tracking projects, "That's going to allow us to be interoperable across the entire family of systems, which would include the platforms, the aviation, the logistics community, the tanks, the Bradleys, the handhelds," Daniels says. ®

Army Smartphone Pilot Study to Wrap up in 6-8 Months

Written by Jack MooreLatest News, Technology & CybersecurityMar 1, 2011

Photo: Elnur

The Army’s long-term vision supports putting a smartphone in the hands of every soldier, according to a recent Army News Service report. However, don’t expect to see BlackBerries and iPhones on the battlefield tomorrow, military officials said.

At a roundtable last week, Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center and one of the Army’s main evangelists of the smartphone idea, gave an update on the Army’s development of smartphone uses and applications.

Within the next six to eight months, the Army will wrap up a pilot study of smartphone use, Vane said, according to Army News Service.

“Whether or not we recommend that all soldiers carry a smartphone would be sort of out in front of the conclusions,” he said. “Though many people are already suggesting that that’s a possibility. Even I have said there’s a long-term vision here that would say if we can figure out the smart, cost-beneficial way of doing this, this probably does make sense in the long run.”

But, the long-term vision must overcome two obvious hurdles.

The first is a culture clash — between the Pentagon’s no-nonsense decision makers and number crunchers and the younger tech-savvy generation made up of what Vane called “digital natives.”

“People that haven’t grown up with [this technology] have a cultural challenge with the use of these technologies and the ability to pick one of these things up and operate them very quickly, to look at a smaller screen, use a different sort of keypad — all those sort of kind of things… there’s a cultural challenge that is part of the issue for the more senior people,” he said.

But, more substantially, there is the issue of security — transmitting sensitive data over cell networks.

Vane acknowledged the importance of security, but he also noted the value of communicating essential battlefield information.

In Afghanistan, many of the Armed Forces’ coalition partners and  adversaries, even, are already using cell phones to coordinate movements.

Soldiers in Afghanistan “look at their Afghan army compatriots or the Taliban guy, who has a cell phone, and then the Army guy looks at his MBITR or his 117G radio and we want to deny that capability to our own soldiers even through the enemy is using them?” Vane asked.