Soldiers To Increasingly Tap Military Apps

By S. William Matthews
Monday, June 4, 2012
Courtesy Of "The Daily"

Modern warfare? There’s an app for that.

Well, not from Apple, but there are a handful from the Pentagon — and more to come. They’re being downloaded on tablets and smartphones to help combat troops complete their missions.

Right now, in transports and fighters, pilots and navigators are on Air Force-issued iPads, checking their orders and reviewing their flight plans.

And this summer, the Army is putting Droids in the hands of grunts headed to Afghanistan so they can receive streaming surveillance video from drones, scan their surroundings for threats, call for fire support and request medical evacuations. Sailors and Marines are connected, too.

Though not a nuclear warhead or an M-16 rifle, the smartphone and the tablet are indeed weapons — helping the warfighter defeat the enemy.

The Air Force has led the electronics revolution and understandably so since it is considered the most technical of the services. The Army is close behind and the Navy and Marines are coming on board, too.

This spring, the Air Force bought 20,000 iPad 2s so air crews in Air Mobility Command and Special Operations Command no longer have to haul around 70 pounds of technical orders, flight manuals, charts and the like. These new “electronic flight bags,” which weigh about a pound apiece, are expected to speed up responses to in-flight emergencies and will most definitely eliminate stacks of paper that can quickly clutter cockpits, officials with the commands said.

Inter-service rivalry might make the Air Force want to claim credit for the Army’s entry into the world of gadgetry, but the Big Green Machine came into it on its own.

Soldiers have their own apps store, which the Army opened in March with prototypes of training manuals mostly.

But dozens of warfighting applications are in development: one tracks the blood pressure and temperature of a wounded troop still on the battlefield, another searches continuously for updated information on nearby enemy activity and yet another translates English into Pashto and Dari. 

The next step is to get all that information to every soldier by making smartphones, and someday tablets, standard equipment, just like boots and rain gear.

The first smartphones and tablets go to Afghanistan in a matter of weeks. Some will use whatever connectivity is available on the battlefield — satellites, cellphone antennas attached to aerostats, aircraft and towers, tiny cellular base stations. Others will boost the brain power of standard military radios for communication.

Michael McCarthy has spent two years testing smartphones and tablets in simulated combat on ranges at Fort Bliss, Texas, and he’s convinced the devices are ready to go to war.

“Imagine getting off a helicopter on a moonless night at 3 a.m. The first thing you have to do is to determine where you’re at,” said McCarthy, director of operations at the Army Brigade Modernization Command.

A smartphone’s global positioning capability can pinpoint its location to within a meter. The phone can then connect to Army databases to download “situational awareness” intelligence — where nearby friendly forces are, where the enemy is, what recent attacks and ambushes were in the vicinity.

A few doubters had worried that a commercial smartphone wouldn’t be rugged enough for combat, but the Army made it more durable by putting it an inexpensive silicon case and sticking a thin film glass protector on the screen, McCarthy, said.

“We don’t have to spend a couple thousand dollars to harden a $200 phone,” he said.

Still, there are limits. McCarthy learned the hard way that a smartphone won’t survive being run over by an armored vehicle, even in a protective case.

“That kind of thing is going to happen,” he said.

In a program called Nett Warrior, the Army uses smartphones to get more out of its Rifleman Radios.

A Droid smartphone is plugged into the radio, and the phone’s ability to run applications and process data transforms the radio into a “dismounted situation awareness and command and control tool,” said Maj. Gregory Soule, one of the officers overseeing the project.

The slick new radio and smartphone combination weighs about 3 pounds, significantly lighter than the clunky radio and computer combo, and costs substantially less. The computers they replace ran $15,000; smartphones cost a few hundred dollars.

As Soule aptly puts it: “This is designed for someone at the tactical edge.”