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US Military Issuing iPod Touches To Soldiers
644bd346996 writes "Newsweek has an article about the latest weapons in the US military's arsenal. The iPod Touch and the iPhone are being adapted as general purpose handhelds for soldiers in the field. 'Apple gadgets are proving to be surprisingly versatile. Software developers and the US Department of Defense are developing military software for iPods that enables soldiers to display aerial video from drones and have teleconferences with intelligence agents halfway across the globe. Snipers in Iraq and Afghanistan now use a "ballistics calculator" called BulletFlight, made by the Florida firm Knight's Armament for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Army researchers are developing applications to turn an iPod into a remote control for a bomb-disposal robot (tilting the iPod steers the robot). In Sudan, American military observers are using iPods to learn the appropriate etiquette for interacting with tribal leaders.'"
The real question is: are the military funded applications sold through the Appstore? Or is the US army jail breaking their phones? Or is Apple providing the military special unlocked iPhones?
Perhaps Apple should consider rerunning their 'think different' campaign - this time with a sniper rather than Ghandi.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
We've all had a good laugh at that clause but they may actually be close to breaching it.
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According to the Ballmer testing division they make excellent projectiles, they have a 99.9% chance of putting an eye out.
Senators were heard saying quote:"These iPhones have become quite useful to the military. I guess it was a good thing we bought a couple to try out even thought they can't really 'jailbreak' you if you get caught taking bribes.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
Ever wanted to blow up the **** out of terrorists?
There is an app for that.
I like the idea. Smartphones have enough computing power and sufficient battery life to perform militarily useful functions, with a minimum of added weight to the soldiers gear.
I'm not sure about the platform choice though. One company controls the hardware and software. There are no alternatives in either category that allow you to benefit from prior investments- replacing the hardware or OS requires junking everything you already have. And if the public APIs don't let you do what you need, and Apple can't or won't, it won't do what you need and thats that.
Android, or even Windows Mobile, I think would be better. A lot easier to switch to another device and minimize training costs, a lot easier and cheaper to get a device custom designed and built for specific military applications. These two are far more open- anyone with a properly trained engineering team and some money can make devices for these platforms. You need a specialized gadget integrated? You'll have a dozen companies salivating at defense budget dollars. You'll get it done, balancing capability and cost will be a meaningful choice and you can make it based on the needs and the budget, not because it's the best of limited options.
Do you understand the concept of 'disposable'? There won't be classified information on these things (that's on the network). When they break, you toss 'em. I don't have a link at the moment, but military personnel have been using consumer GPS units since the war broke out.
A mil spec iPod would be too heavy to move without a Humvee and too expensive to give to anyone under the rank of Captain.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I could shoot 'at' an iPod all day long and not damage it. It's when I accidentally hit the target that there may be problems.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The right spelling is Gandhi.
Gan as in "gone" + dhi as in the first portion of 'this'.
what could possibly go wrong?
there have been stories about the Chinese sneaking counterfeit chips into military application some of which have made there way into military aircraft.
using a consumer gadget built in china seems like a truly epically bad idea.
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
This kind of case is what the iPods get put in. I'd say they're probably close enough to mil spec that it makes the iPods clearly more cost effective. It's not like iPods are particularly fragile to begin with - once you protect them from moisture and sand, the only significant vulnerability that remains is the touch screen itself, which is easily protected with a flip cover. I doubt that temperature is much of an issue, given that they are all solid-state devices.
Another example of an enclosure is this one, for the first-gen touch, shown at the bottom of the page with an attached sniper rifle. This is clearly one of the best-protected iPods in the world. If you read more on that site, you'll see that they have done plenty of testing to ensure that the iPod can survive the shock of the attached rifle being fired numerous times.
Not. Unless they are getting milspec units I wonder how many lives are being put in danger by using consumer products in such varied environments.
Soldiers have been using consumer grade electronics in the field for a very long time now. Army procurement in Iraq & Afghanistan is glacial at best and more often than not, its easier to order something stateside and have is shipped over either by the company or your family.
And now for a tragedy in two parts:
Date: December 2004
Setting- SecDef Rumsfeld is taking questions from 2,300 soldiers in a hangar at Camp Buehring, Kuwait.
Part 1.
Army Spc. Thomas Wilson: My question is more logistical. We've had troops in Iraq for coming up on three years and we've always staged here out of Kuwait. Now why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromise ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?
[Applause from the soldiers]
Sec Def Rumsfeld: I missed the first part of your question. And could you repeat it for me?
Army Spc. Thomas Wilson: Yes, Mr. Secretary. Our soldiers have been fighting in Iraq for coming up on three years. A lot of us are getting ready to move north relatively soon. Our vehicles are not armored. We're digging pieces of rusted scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass that's already been shot up, dropped, busted, picking the best out of this scrap to put on our vehicles to take into combat. We do not have proper armament vehicles to carry with us north.
Part 2.
Sec Def Rumsfeld: I talked to the General coming out here about the pace at which the vehicles are being armored. They have been brought from all over the world, wherever they're not needed, to a place here where they are needed. I'm told that they are being - the Army is - I think it's something like 400 a month are being done. And it's essentially a matter of physics. It isn't a matter of money. It isn't a matter on the part of the Army of desire. It's a matter of production and capability of doing it.
As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
The End
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I dunno, you should ask this guy!
Bush hating
Hey! Some of us absolutely LOVE bush.
Stop the Apple users are gay innuendo!
Much of the clothing, camping, and cold weather gear available at a local REI performs better than what is issued to U.S. soldiers. The military has been slow to adopt consumer products which may work better than what is currently being supplied. This is gradually changing, and it's a change for the better. You don't always need everything to be radiation hardened. Sometimes the best product for a given job is available now, and you don't want to wait for it to be tested ad nauseum, debated, defended, and advocated through the convoluted military procurement process. An iPod Touch is relatively cheap, cheap enough that it's almost disposable. On the other hand, it's too bad there's not an option for AA batteries. Recharging is tough in the field.
Make love, not reality television.
The important thing to keep in mind here is that equipping our troops with the iPod Touch and iPhone provides them with something that no other technology can: that smug, hipper-than-thou sense of superiority that comes with being an Apple user. If Al Qaeda and the Taliban are still using Microsoft products, then their morale will suffer because they don't have the latest, cutting-edge gadgets, and they will lose tactical effectiveness on the battlefield.
I was more reminded of this Doonesbury.
PDAs/Smartphones which have the desired functionality have existed for many years before the iPhone/iPod touch. .NET compact framework is much nicer than developing for the iPhone (background processes, yeah!)
And using C# with the
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Yes, I was being a tad sarcastic - but you don't even need to re engineer the thing. Just put it in a nice holster / protector and you are most of the way there. And like I said, they can be pretty much disposable.
If this works out, then somebody can build a mil spec iPod from scratch, but as a demonstration of concept, I don't see anything wrong with it. 10 million teenagers can't be too far wrong...
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
You may remember that, in the earlier days of the Iraq war, soldiers would write home begging for their families to send them Talkabout FRS radios. Yup, those little handheld radios sold in blister packs at Wal-Mart for camping trips.
Those things are, doubtless, less secure, less durable, less resistant to interference, and less powerful than purpose-built military communications systems would be. However, they had one big advantage: they were available to the soldiers when they needed them.
If the military has trouble getting a mature technology like handheld radios into the hands the troops, you can bet that they'd flub something like handheld computers even worse. Sometimes, it's better to just buy the darned things at Wal-Mart.
This. We brought over more personal electronics gear than most people who haven't seen would believe. AND there's PXs on most of the bigger posts that will sell you more. AND Amazon.com ships to APOs (yes we could get to Amazon.com, don't be silly). We brought back more personal electronics gear than we brought over by probably at least an order of magnitude :-). The vast majority of it survived just fine. One guy blew out his X-Box plugging it into the wrong power, and digital camera screens got kinda scratched up from the dust, but in general, consumer spec gear did just fine (iPhones and iPod Touches having glass screens would be a big advantage there. Much harder to scratch).
Now computers... those didn't survive as well. Personal game systems tended to stay in peoples relatively well sealed quarters, so they were mostly fine, but the grit really got into to anything that got taken outside much. Moving parts like hard drives, fans, and CD-ROMs failed a lot on our non-ruggedized laptops. The iPhone/Pods are fairly well sealed, all solid state, and like I said, have glass screens. Get a little plug to put into the ear phone holes and I think they'd have quite a reasonable failure rate.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Back in the day when the Steves ran Apple there was a very strong understanding the Apple won't sell anything to the military for any reason, especially for warfare. Of course the military wasn't ever directly sold Apple products, but they aquired them through third party purchasers and ended up being in the missile silos anyway.
I would imagine this business decree was tossed out with Jobs to help bolster sales any way they could.
That, my friends, is where my fanboy history ends - I bought a PC and ran linux. The rest I read in the flame wars here.
DEVICE SELECT: DRONE='predator1'
DRONESTATUS=predator1: >IN RANGEONLINEINVENTORY>WEAPONS>AVAIL
WEAPONSAVAIL>MISSILE=0,1,2,3
SELECT MISSILE=3
MISSILE=3> TARGET=2
MISSILE3/TARGET2: 'fire'
ERROR: This device is protected by DRM. Please contact your dealer or reseller, call Apple directly at 1-800-APL-CARE, or you can visit our knowledge base on the World Wide Web at www.apple.com/support/ipodtouch/.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
That's interesting. Does it also allow you to lock it down so that only sanctioned apps can go on it, or so that only fully approved updates can be installed? They're the kind of features I'd be looking for if I had to approve the phone or touch for military applications.
Well that sort of depends on what backdoors the chinese firmware creators left in.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Although I have nothing wrong in general with items made in another country, I woudl think that military items should be created in the country within which it is issued. Take for example, the recent thing about spys infiltrating the national Grid.
Have a nice day!
They're working on a french version. It will be called the iSurrender.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Heard this a few years back in a political discussion, and I must say I agree with it:
"I'm pro-bush, but not the George W kind."
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.