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Android Goes To the Battlefield

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-the-terminator-kind dept.

wiseandroid writes "Google's mobile operating system Android has won plenty of adherents among cellphone makers and gadget manufacturers since its 2007 debut. Now defense contractor Raytheon is preparing it for a more urgent mission: saving lives in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan. Using Android software tools, Raytheon engineers have built a basic application for military personnel that combines maps with a buddy list. Raytheon calls the entire framework the Raytheon Android Tactical System, or RATS for short. Mark Bigham, a vice president of business development in Raytheon's Intelligence and Information Systems unit, says the company selected Android because its open source nature made developing applications easy."

21 of 128 comments (clear)

  1. Saving lives?? by raju1kabir · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why do breathless writers always say "saving lives" when they refer to military applications? They're about taking lives. Just taking different ones.

    --
    "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
    1. Re:Saving lives?? by MobileTatsu-NJG · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why do breathless writers always say "saving lives" when they refer to military applications? They're about taking lives. Just taking different ones.

      The lives they're saving are on our side. Also, this article isn't talking about Android being used as a weapon.

      --

      "I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)

    2. Re:Saving lives?? by LordAndrewSama · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's more patriotic. people like feeling good about themselves, and "Killing foreigners" isn't as patriotic of soldiers as "saving lives".

    3. Re:Saving lives?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Don't forget the "fight for freedom" which means ours and not theirs.

    4. Re:Saving lives?? by Yvan256 · · Score: 2, Funny

      I heard about people in Redmond using chairs as weapons.

    5. Re:Saving lives?? by raju1kabir · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I think Iraqis enjoy quite a bit more freedom today than they did under Saddam.

      Having visited Iraq now and then during the war and "post" war period, I disagree. People almost invariably say they lost more than they gained. They used to have limited political freedom. Now they can't leave the house without worrying about getting shot.

      --
      "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
    6. Re:Saving lives?? by IDtheTarget · · Score: 2, Informative

      The lives they're saving are on our side. Our "side"? Imperial stormtroopers Their "side"? Mothers, children and helpless villagers, "inconveniently located" on top of something we want to steal.

      Ahem. As one of those "Imperial stormtroopers", I'd ask you if you've ever deployed overseas to see what really happens over there. In the Army we call CNN "Pravda". Because their reporting has the same relationship to the truth that the old USSR paper did. I deployed to Iraq for a year. I didn't kill anybody, and our unit helped to build schools and hospitals. But that doesn't help CNN's political agenda, so they never reported it, though we had a CNN reporter embedded for about a week.

    7. Re:Saving lives?? by ClosedSource · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The fact that you consider CNN "Pravda" is disconcerting. I suspect there's a bit of indoctrination going on in the Army. How many of those who enlist had actually heard of Pravda until they joined the military?

      Besides, CNN was quite the cheerleader when the Iraq war started and didn't do their job of keeping the government honest.

      Of course, the sacrifices that men and women like you made are real and we appreciate it. We just hate to see your valor wasted on an unnecessary war.

    8. Re:Saving lives?? by ducomputergeek · · Score: 4, Informative

      "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

      --
      "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    9. Re:Saving lives?? by raju1kabir · · Score: 3, Insightful

      This is a fascinating distinction for people halfway around the planet to debate about in online forums.

      For the people in Iraq who just want to live their lives in peace, it's not really that salient on a day-to-day basis. What matters to them is that their existence is orders of magnitude more perilous post-invasion than it was in the Saddam days.

      --
      "Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
    10. Re:Saving lives?? by Runaway1956 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      "The fact that you consider CNN "Pravda" is disconcerting. I suspect there's a bit of indoctrination going on in the Army."

      Old Navy here. Naturally, I can't speak for the Army - but we had our own opinions of the newspapers. They seldom reported anything the way it was. When we made the papers, each paper put it's own spin on things, sometimes to the point that the story was simply untrue. Left leaning newspapers generally try to make us look bad, right leaning newspapers try to make us all look like heros. The fact is, we were just doing our jobs, and sometimes the job was dangerous and unpleasant. The single time we made the news, when all the papers got things near right, was the reporting on Beirut City, 1978. Everyone agreed that things were confused, and that statement was more accurate than any other statement ever made about any of our missions.

      No "indoctrination" is needed if some grunt tells us that he calls a liberal paper the Pravda. He sees what is happening with his own eyes, and the paper reports something different - he needs no help drawing his own conclusions.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
    11. Re:Saving lives?? by Runaway1956 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm most certainly not a liberal or a neocon - but you've sampled the Koo-Aid. The fact is, life in Iraq was much more stable under Saddam than it is today. Immeasurably more stable. You really should find some articles about the bookstores in Iraq. What happened to them epitomizes what has happened throughout Iraq.

      Yeah, Saddam was an evil sumbitch, and he deserved to die, but he was a stabilizing force, no matter how much we disliked him. IMHO, pure arrogance on the part of a neocon president forced the military to invade Iraq.

      --
      "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
  2. acronym by igotmybfg · · Score: 2, Funny

    You would think ARTS would be a more psychologically pleasing acronym than RATS, but what do I know, I'm just a code monkey...

  3. Limited Distribution Benefits by Doc+Ruby · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Android apps don't have to pass through a central app store to get widely distributed to a set of Android phones. So the military can limit distribution of the apps. They could even distribute an Android OS distro with a crypto key that is bonded to that phone's serial#, which is needed by any app to run or even to decompress/decrypt from the distribution package, so military apps can't be used or inspected outside the military's own phones.

    Is there any way to do something like that on iPhones? Like at least just developing an app that doesn't get run through Apple at all (signing or uploaded to the App Store), but is just an install package downloadable from a website (perhaps with a password) and installable on a phone, perhaps with an unlock code. AFAICT, that's all locked out by Apple's iPhone architecture. Has anyone figured out how to do "distributed distribution", without needing Apple at the center of all of it? On iPhones that aren't jailbroken, just the stock iPhones that anyone can have?

    --

    --
    make install -not war

    1. Re:Limited Distribution Benefits by ducomputergeek · · Score: 2, Informative

      http://www.apple.com/iphone/business/integration/#deploying

      There is the Apple Enterprise Developers program for creating and deploying in house apps.

      http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/apply.html

      --
      "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
  4. I'll wait for the field trials by iron+spartan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It sounds good, but then again so did Land Warrior.

    I can see it being useful in an urban environment, but can see a lot of issues with it in the mountains of Afghanistan. First being connectivity. Relying on a cell network in a 3rd world country doesn't seem like all that good of an idea. Getting a reliable signal in the mountains is hard as it is. It would be very bad for a unit to get used to using this system, and then get somewhere that it no longer works.

    Second problem is EM signature. Cell phones broadcast as long as they are on. In urban areas, with lots of cell phones this isn't all that big of deal. In areas with very low populations, a cell phone being on can easily give away a platoons position. Frequency hoping helps with this on regular military radios and cell phones can't do this.

  5. Re:Can GPL'd software contributors block this? by Hope+Thelps · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Is there any way for contributors to the free software movement to block use of their software by military contractors?

    That would be contrary to the goals of the GPL, which aims to grant freedom to use the software for any purpose and to modify it to achieve those purposes. You'd need to use a different license to achieve your aims.

    --
    To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
  6. But not really. by transiit · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is an article based on a Raytheon press release. What hardware does said application run on? Even the article suggested there's no established contract yet.

    I like the idea that open source/free software is getting more traction in this area, but no platform, no contract suggestes this is just fluff. Whether or not your bullshit meter started twitching that they've been working on this for two years is up to you.

    Bonus BS points that they throw in the "Oh, and it could also be a biometric scanner". Feature creep comes early.

  7. Re:Linux? by earlymon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Did Raytheon miss the announcement that linux is open source too?

    You know, it's entirely possible that they did. You should email them this link right away!

    http://developer.android.com/guide/basics/what-is-android.html

    --
    Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
  8. Re:Can GPL'd software contributors block this? by ClosedSource · · Score: 4, Funny

    If you shoot a projectile that contains embedded GPL'd code do you have to provide the victim with a copy of the code since there was a "distribution"?

  9. Re:Can GPL'd software contributors block this? by atilla+filiz · · Score: 2, Informative

    "For example, the GPLv2 in no way limits your use of the software. If you're a mad scientist, you can use GPLv2'd software for your evil plans to take over the world ("Sharks with lasers on their heads!!"), and the GPLv2 just says that you have to give source code back. And that's OK by me. I like sharks with lasers. I just want the mad scientists of the world to pay me back in kind. I made source code available to them, they have to make their changes to it available to me. After that, they can fry me with their shark-mounted lasers all they want. "
    -- Linus Torvalds