Dueling devices
iPhones and Androids take on battlefield computers
By Ben Iannotta
July 01, 2011
July 01, 2011
DRS PXI
DRS Technologies and General Dynamics are locked in a competition to supply the U.S. Army with prototypes of rugged, wearable computers, but their biggest competition might not be each other.
The two classes of devices share overlapping — but not identical — goals. The Army, through its Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications initiative, began looking at consumer phones last year with a goal of giving them to all troops, and quickly. The service has since backed off the goal of giving all soldiers phones, but not its intention to explore the devices for some of the most challenging “outside the wire” — or battlefield — applications.
Exactly which troops should receive phones is one of many issues to be determined in the coming months at the Fort Bliss-White Sands complex, which was chosen because it is nearly the size of Connecticut.
Meanwhile, at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, technologists are waiting for the prototypes to start arriving in September from General Dynamics C4 Systems and DRS. They are being procured under a program called Joint Battle Command-Platform (JBC-P) Handheld, which aims to give foot soldiers force-tracking information and potentially a host of other data through consumer-style applications. By design, operational versions of these devices would not be destined for all troops. Achieving connectivity will require plugging the devices into radios, and those are typically carried by squad leaders or commanders because of the cost of the equipment. The main purpose for these devices will be as command-and-control and situational-awareness tools.
Advocates of these handhelds do not come right out and say the Army should not buy commercial phones for “outside the wire” applications — but they come close. Executives ticked off a long list of drawbacks to commercial iPhones and their Android equivalents, including their susceptibility to the most common substance on Earth: water.
A smartphone works well in the “controlled environment of my pocket,” said Greg Eslinger, the architect for hand-held devices at General Dynamics. Life in the battle zone is less controllable, he said.
“I’m a soldier, and I’m marking down a road, and I decide there’s an area that’s problematic with IEDs [improvised explosive devices], and now I have to get off that road and get into a canal,” he said.
A soldier could seal his phone in an off-the-shelf protective case, but “I don’t know of one that’s waterproof,” Eslinger said.
The company’s prototype, called the GD300, is waterproof to one meter.
An issue facing the Army is whether it can afford to buy both kinds of handhelds. On one side are the rugged and waterproof devices, with touch screens that are sensitive to gloved fingers and that can be viewed in sunlight or through night-vision goggles. On the other side are the consumer devices, which are less expensive but also not made to operate in extreme hot and cold.
Officials in each camp expect the Army to buy some of both.
“We’re not trying to replace or compete with JBC-P, JTRS [the Joint Tactical Radio System program], or any other program of record,” said Mike McCarthy, a co-manager of the digital applications initiative.
His team’s job is to “fill the gaps between programs of record with technology that is renewable and can be refreshed rapidly.”
“Is there some overlap in capability? Absolutely, yes. And that’s OK,” he said. “It’s redundant communication. That way, you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket.”
In the rugged handheld camp, industry officials are underscoring the need for their devices, too. “It may not be that you need to have a full rugged military device for every mission, but you probably will need it for some missions,” said Bill Guyan, vice president of programs and strategy for DRS Tactical Systems, in Melbourne, Fla.
The devices have many of the strengths of consumer devices, he said, and soldiers should find them familiar.
As for the ruggedness, Eslinger of General Dynamics said consumers know not to leave their smartphones in their cars on hot days because the phones sometimes don’t work right away. “As you can imagine, soldiers can’t sit around to wait for devices to cool down,” he said.
General Dynamics has also given thought to ergonomics. In tests with early models, most soldiers have chosen to wear the GD300 on their chests, though the device also can be carried in pouches on the arm or wrist, according to General Dynamics.
McCarthy said the Aberdeen competition will leave plenty of room for consumer phones: “The Army doesn’t have the ability to get [that handheld] down to the individual soldiers. It’s designed to be part of a command-and-control system. It’s a niche.”
The rugged phone advocates see the consumer devices in much the same way. The phones would be best suited to the “garrison,” Eslinger said
McCarthy said empirical evidence says otherwise: “The soldiers I spoke with yesterday, who are using the phones, are exceptionally pleased with the capabilities the smartphones give them outside the wire.”
Costly connectivity
General Dynamics cautions against calculating the cost of a single GD300 by looking at how much the Army plans to pay for the first batch of devices. (DRS would not address the cost issue or the value of its contract.) The payment covers one-time engineering costs to devise an adapter and software to link them to different types of radios, plus training for the first users, they said.
Nevertheless, in March, under the JBC-P Handheld program, General Dynamics received a $2.3 million contract for 40 prototypes, which would work out to $57,500 per device.
Another price point comes from a separate initiative by Army Rangers to test the GD300 in Afghanistan. The Rangers purchased 55 GD300s at a total cost $250,000, which works out to $4,545 per phone.
A General Dynamics official said a single GD300 sold for domestic use costs $1,205.
Consumer smartphones would be cheaper — McCarthy said he expects a “significant price break” when the Army buys them in bulk. But critics point out that the Army has to figure out how to replicate a domestic cellular network in what are sure to be inhospitable locales. The Army’s radios, which the wearable devices would plug into, already exist.
The Army does not yet know how much the smartphones initiative would cost, though McCarthy said the service is studying the question.
In the meantime, work is underway to find the best option for a deployable cellular network. Base stations — the 30-pound computers that decide who is allowed to be on a network — would be required, plus various kinds of antennas in lieu of fixed cellular towers.
In June, the Army started testing three commercially provided options for the cellular transport layer, a mix of base stations and communications nodes. The contractors must show how their equipment would be picked up and moved as soldiers travel to new areas of the White Sands complex.
To solve the tower problem, the Army is looking at “very small antennas that can be erected” in the field, McCarthy said. A 100-foot-tall antenna would cover a 30-kilometer radius, he said.
Incorporating aircraft and aerostats would extend the communications range. At Fort Huachuca. Ariz., in October, technologists tested this concept by unreeling an aerostat and flying a Navy jet, a propeller plane and an airship over the fort’s high desert range.
“What we were able to do is extend the cellular network to 370 kilometers,” he said.
More than vehicle tracking
In the wearable computer competition, the Army has challenged the contractors to show how they would deliver friendly-vehicle-tracking information, annotated maps and smartphone-style applications to hand-held devices. Today, squad leaders and commanders must leave this information behind when they set out on foot. Vehicle locations are displayed on computers installed in about a third of the Army’s ground vehicles. The JBC-P Handheld program would extend the tracking information farther into the field. It is the next increment of the Army’s Force 21 Battle Command Brigade and Below network, which is similar to the service’s more famous Blue Force Tracking network. The Force 21 network routes location data via radios, whereas Blue Force Tracker uses communications satellites.
General Dynamics has been positioning itself for at least six years to provide the U.S. military with specially built hand-held devices.
In 2005, the company bought mobile device manufacturer Itronix of Spokane, Wash., the unit that now makes the GD300 and a series of other products. In January 2010, General Dynamics bought Ascend Intelligence, the small Arlington, Va., company that worked with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop an application called TIGR, for the Tactical Ground Reporting. With this application, patrol leaders can read up on past action, learn about tribal leaders and enter their own notes. General Dynamics plans to make it one of the main apps available on the GD300.
The wearable computer providers expect their competition to be just a start.
“It’s the subject of the [competition with General Dynamics] to determine what additional functionality is required beyond the smartphone you could get at Best Buy,” said Guyan of DRS.
The US Army is near finishing a largely successful test of smartphones on the battlefield. In an interview this week, project director Michael McCarthy told CNN the six-week trials in Fort Bliss, Texas and White Sands, New Mexico were 'encouraging' in gauging the effectiveness of Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone hardware for communicating information in the field. They had also been testing iPads as well as unspecified Dell and HP tablets...
