Unleash the iPads of War! Military Ma...

Unleash the iPads of War! Military Maps Now Apps

from Danger Room by Spencer Ackerman

Ever since the Army held a contest for iPhone and Android applications in March, software developers have drooled at the chance to get in on the military market. Judging by what’s on display at the annual Association of the U.S. Army confab in Washington, get ready for a lot of apps that map — keeping track of both allies and enemies.

The above display on the iPad of a Textron Systems employee shows a map of friendly and hostile locations — the blue houses have U.S. troops in them — that soldiers can gather out in the field and send back to their command stations for further analysis. It’s running through SoldierEyes, a secure cloud that runs lots of little applets for intelligence, command-and-control and battlefield awareness, developed by two Textron subsidiaries, Overwatch and AAI.

The SoldierEyes Common Operating Picture, for instance, is like a mini Blue Force Tracker, explains Evan Cormin, who works on the project: a real-time way for soldiers to monitor where friendly forces are at any given time, represented by little blue boxes. And not just friendlies: Plug in an enemy’s position, and the cloud shares it with anyone else running SoldierEyes, whether out on patrol or back at the command post. Its GPS components allow soldiers to use the map for navigation while they see where their friends and foes are.

Load Augmented Reality, another SoldierEyes sub-app, ditches the map. Instead, it uses your handheld’s camera to give you a picture of what’s in front of you — but with the colored boxes of friendlies and enemies in position on the screen. The idea is make sure that soldiers getting out of their vehicles don’t lose a sense of their surroundings once the Humvee doors swing open and they aren’t behind a computer screen anymore.

Not to be outdone, Raytheon has designed its own smartphone, called RATS, for Raytheon Advanced Tactical Systems. Mark Bigham, a company vice president for business development, shows off the RATS apps on his own touchscreen Android phone. Running over a 3G network using a server hosted in a laptop called Ratman, RATS runs maps that represent friendlies and hostiles ID’d by any individual user.

Distribution isn’t automatic: Individual users have to send particular identifications out in order to compile a common master map. You share them with what’s essentially a version of a Buddy List to create — yes — a RAT pack. A complementary app, “Salute Report,” allows soldiers to text a report back to their bases using a template of the Army’s standard format. RATS can also send video images, but that takes a lot of bandwidth.

But the feature Bigham is most juiced about is basically an MS Paint program to ID enemy fighters. “Say Robert’s the bad guy,” he says, snapping a photo of an unsuspecting nearby Raytheon employee. Using a quick touchscreen stylus program, Bigham traces a red circle around a picture of Robert’s face. “Now we disseminate it in seconds … and in the [command center], they upload the image, asking, ‘Is this the guy I want to get?” Bigham says. If Robert doesn’t look out, the new mapping apps may have the cavalry coming for him.

Photo: Spencer Ackerman