US Army Looking for a Few Good Apps

[Paul Daniel Ash]

Leaders from the US Army's technology command visited Apple at its Cupertino headquarters as part of a program to investigate the use of consumer electronic products on the battlefield. The US military has been radically upgrading its Army command, control, communications, computers and intelligence (C4I) systems, as technology advances - in many cases built on inventions originally developed by the Defense Department - filter back into military use.

The Army announced today that the awesomely-named Major General Nick Justice, commander of the Research, Development and Engineering Command (RDECOM) brought key members of his staff to One Infinite Loop on March 5, and toured labs and other facilities. The Army's research and development command is evaluating commercial hand-held devices that will better meet the more nimble 21st century force. "The Army is moving away from big-green-box solutions," General Justice said, and "toward those that will adapt along with our warfighters on the battlefield."

The Army's "Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications" initiative will investigate how the Army could be using hand-held devices - like iPods, iPhones and iPads - in the military context. RDECOM's Communications-Electronics Research and Development Center has already developed two iPhone apps: COIN Collector, a counter-insurgency information collection tool, and MilSpace, a planning and social networking app. "Apple technologies offer unique and proven solutions with intuitive designs that allow users to learn quickly without a training manual," said Ron Szymanski, CERDEC's lead computer scientist.

Military uses for iPhone technology have already been explored by key defense contractor Raytheon, whose One Force Tracker app uses the iPhone's GPS technology to show the location of friendly and enemy forces on Google-like maps in real time, and provides secure communications to identify threats like snipers and coordinate battlefield activities. Raytheon indicated they may be developing a heavily modded, ruggedized iPhone for use with the app.

[GellBrake'rrrr]

Every soldier should have an iDevice... And they probably already do 's and 's

[spider_pig448]

Awesome!

[ikesmasher]

this was already posted on the front page a while back..

[GellBrake'rrrr]

I thought the same thing. But hey, news is always repettitive. I'm already used to it.

[matthew1111]

Raytheon is gunna jailbreak the iPhone's pretty much!

[moon#pie]

I wanna mil spec iphone!

[romeo_herman]

I know.......

[RonHC]

Uncle Sam looks pissed

[hitman10]

sounds like a good idea. what happens when i kill a solider and take his phone. Know i have the whole battle plan in my hand... la lala now im going to run back and show everyone where the sniper is and what not.

[rampagebegins]

its all fun and games until someone starts playing papi jump in the middle of a warzone

[extremzocker]

ruggedized iPhone... still a sexy Apple product??

[ElektronBlue]

For how off the GPS can be at times - I'm surprised it's considered for " One Force Tracker app uses the iPhone's GPS technology to show the location of friendly and enemy forces on Google-like maps in real time"...

"Oops yep sorry the blue blink dot was 30 clicks off....... sorry?"

[LSZ33]

I knew this would happen one day. Especially since apple mentioned in one of their videos for the iPhone 3gs that the Army was among one of the fortune 500 companies that field tested the Microsoft exchange beta prior to 3.0 release. Hopefully we'll get these soon. I'm sure raytheon won't be the only govt contractor making a blue force tracker app. Most likely General Dynamics will jump in as well. The ipad would be alot better than the crappy panasonic toughbooks we currently use.

[victis]

sounds like a good idea. what happens when i kill a solider and take his phone. Know i have the whole battle plan in my hand... la lala now im going to run back and show everyone where the sniper is and what not.

same thought!