Army Develops Android-Based Framework For Battlefield Ops

gabbo529 writes "The United States Army is developing an Android-based smartphone framework and suite of applications for tactical operations. With the marriage between technology and military continuing to strengthen, more soldiers are getting phones for on-the-field operations. Already, the military has developed the Joint Battle Command-Platform, or JBC-P Handheld, which has an app that can be used to mark warning signals to future soldiers."

Comments

Question

[rlp]

Question for those who know about such things - wouldn't the RF emissions from a phone of the battlefield give away information about troop locations and deployment?

Re:Question

[drinkypoo]

Without commenting on any military technology I don't understand anyway, it is theoretically possible to do relatively narrow-beam communications to a repeater in the sky, e.g. a satellite or an AWACS. But most of the time the bad guys know nominally where we are, and since we mostly bomb poor people with a pretty lousy military they wouldn't have the technology to figure out where individuals are and target them... yet. I'd guess these systems actually do just use broadcast communications but it's simply not an issue... yet.

Re:Question

[couchslug]

Modern battlefields are saturated with RF. If required for stealth ops in nation-state war equipment can be turned off.

In non-nation-state war ease of communication and the very short value of most data make convenient comms useful.

Re:Question

[DrgnDancer]

My guess is that the tactical versions of all of this will use a frequency hoping radio in the "phone" and a dedicated military tower infrastructure with encryption. We already have the equivalent of mobile cell towers that can be put up or dropped in thirty minutes or so. There's almost certainly a lot more to this than a few Android apps, but using Android as the base OS on the portable soldier carried device will save a lot of development work.

Write drivers for the Android kernel that abstract away the specialty radio hardware, and suddenly you can do secure tactical communication software development using the same tools that make Angry Birds. better still this stuff can be tested, proof of concepted, even trained on back in the US using cheap commercial hardware, then put on ruggedized equipment with more secure radio hardware in theater.

Re:Question

[ColdWetDog]

Angry Birds could be the basis of one fantastic mortar app.

Re:Question

[rickb928]

Yes, the modern battlefield is saturated with RF. EW operations now include cellphone and GPS manipulation, so you can safely assume that if we want to listen in on Al Queda cell calls in Afghanistan, we can. And probably triangulate the phone location at least as well as Apple can with a stock iPhone & IOS4(?).

But a battle-ready smartphone doesn't need to be limited to conventional spectrum. And with a decent encrypted radio, such as is being used already, communications can be relatively safe. Relatively, I say, since with time and resources most anything can be figured out. One of the goals of an EW operation is to deny the enemy the information they seek within a useful time period. If they work out which of the targets is the strike aircraft after it's delivered its munitions and exited the theater, well, that's nice glad you figured out who just flattened your CP good buddy.

I expect JBC-P will be a well hardened battlefield comm system, and will survive in a hostile RF environment. I epxect it will be delivered with multiple options, satellite, terrestrial, and other RF modes. Even probably link into other network on the battlefield, is it DL16 the Air force is using now for their data networking, shared with the Navy and others?

Sounds like an excellent approach. Android can offer fairly quick development cycles with good talent, and it's being actively improved daily. Requirements are low, it's as open as you're gonna get, and having an enhanced device means troops could be getting better mapping, more intel, and more reliable comm. In battle, sometimes it's who sees who first. More info = success.

App usage while out on patrol

[Tanlis]

While out in the field with the Android phone and the new apps...

Sergeant: Private! Check to see if any other patrols have left any warning signals near here.

Private: Ok Sarge!

5 minutes later...

Sergeant: Private! What's taking so long? Are there any damn warnings?!?!

Private: Ohh! Sorry Sarge. I had to wait for the ad for Angry Birds Rio to finish loading and then I decided to download to it.

Sergeant: Gomer!!!

so...

[Charliemopps]

So Google will be tracking all of our military assets as well as our citizens? Awesome.

Re:OSS - Bad Idea

[DrgnDancer]

There's no GPL issue. The military simple doesn't release the software. The GPL allows organizations to keep their source code private as long as they don't try to redistribute the software. What the military does is the functional equivalent of Google making proprietary kernel mods for their internal version of Linux, except the "organization" happens to have a few million employees. Sometimes they do release military software to the public, but in that case if the compiled binary isn't classified, the source has to have been scrubbed for classified information before compilation. So releasing source wouldn't be an issue anyway.

Some background information

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to get some solid information out there to counter the "hurr durr soldiers playing angry birds" stuff. The Army has been planning how to utilize mobile devices for a while. Implementing everything takes a lot of time, however, because of bureaucratic regulations. (Anyone who's worked corporate IT has an idea.) It's basically a three-phase plan, which is pretty much forked into separate projects at this point.
Phase 1- Develop mobile apps/webapps for unclassified material. (As mentioned above, search the App Store/Market for FA53 and you'll find quite a few of these.) This is non-tactical stuff, simply leveraging the number of soldiers who already own smartphones. Happening now.
Phase 2- Develop technologies to comply with federal IT security standards, to allow for apps for sensitive (still unclassified) material. Once all the pieces are in place (at-rest encryption, smart card access for multifactor authentication, few other things), likely see an official Army device. Likely Android, but WP7/BB are still possibilities, they're just farther back on jumping the hurdles. (Apple is out of the running at this point unless I'm totally misreading the tea leaves) Happening in the next few years.
Phase 3- Go tactical. This will most certainly be a custom device (as discussed in the article), which will resemble the current Android experience very little. (No Market, no root, etc.) Significant infrastructure challenges still exist here (the Army cell network doesn't exist, yet), and that's not even touching on all the security issues revolving around classified material. It's a lot harder to lose a mapping system attached to a vehicle than a pocket device. It'll happen, but it won't be anytime soon for large-scale Army fielding. Can't comment on what may or may not be in development for SOCOM, though.