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The US Army is now at the tail end of a six-week trial of more than 300 Smartphones including the Android, iPhone, and Windows Phone devices for military use. According to program director Michael McCarthy, the results have been promising, especially because of the familiarity of smartphones under the younger soldiers who grew up with smartphones and gadgets.
Example usages of the smartphones for Soldiers could be:
- Texting GPS coordinates,
- sending photographs of their surroundings,
- or filing reports directly from their phone.
Despite positive results, there are still obvious hurdles when it comes to using consumer technology for military use which include:
- Security – the devices aren’t considered secure enough to use in overseas operations-as some of the phones had OS bugs.
- Signal – Some phone’s couldn’t get network signal in the New Mexico and Texas testing areas
Other aspects that come to mind would be durability as Consumer smartphone’s aren’t designed to be as robust as military equipment
To Address the issues with security the US Army is considering connecting the phones to tactical radios to help encrypt transmissions. They are testing self contained “cell tower in a suitcase” equipment which will ensure network coverage in sensitive locations.
The Military hopes to push out limited deployment this year, and Army program director Ed Mazzanti has stated that they expect to select two mobile operating systems for official use, noting that “iPhone and Android have been very well received.” Sure, using multiple platforms may help protect soldiers against cyber attacks, but we can’t be the only ones worried the Army is unintentionally breeding a generation of fanboys with guns, can we?
US Army runs smartphone trial via Engadget
It does make a lot of sense for the Military to benefit form the commercialized technology however it would probably be a smart move to modify the devices at least to provide some form of strong encryption for data going over the air.
