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Army Plots Its Smartphone Strategy
gManZboy writes "What kind of smartphone should a soldier have? Ahead of the impending expiration of two communications contracts, the Army's 5th Signal Command is prepping for the possibility of buying thousands of mobile devices. An RFI asks for BlackBerrys, 'emerging smartphones included but not limited to 4G devices such as Androids [and] iPhones,' tablet computers, and wireless broadband access devices. Also in the Army mobile vision: an apps marketplace."
Should soldiers carry homing beacons?
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-05-27/
Whatever they get, they need to have vastly increased battery life over the consumer versions.
Possibly a physical switch to turn off all transmissions as well (so it can be QUICKLY turned off).
Not if they lock it to approved apps and court martial anybody that's caught sideloading. I'm guessing the bigger problem is going to be the apps that are approved themselves.
Also Apple is very unlikely to agree to make custom military units with whatever requirements the military has. It's just not their thing.
They'll be better served customising Android and should have no trouble finding a hardware vendor.
As a side note, knowing the military the requirements will be decided by committee, resulting in something in that weighs 5 pounds to satisfy all the criteria.
That is about as smart as having an app marketplace. Gee, wonder if it will be targeted by malware?
Can't tell if trolling...
Big defen$e contract$
Hmm...
What you pseudointellectuals don't know is that prior to WWII fascism was in vogue and Hitler was quite the darling
Wait, let's see that again in slow motion:
Hitler
Well, then. That settles that.
You'll never guess what fascism was called back then. It was called progressivism.
No, Mussolini called it Fascismo. There was this whole "Partito Nazionale Fascista" thing going on back then.
Even though you're trolling, it might be decent to point out that software "marketplaces" run by large corporations for their employees to use on an internal basis are nothing more than software repositories with an integrated update function and an emergency killswitch should problems with installed software arise. This lets employees exercise a degree of control over what they want on their machine while using a codebase that has been vetted and approved by the IT staff and thus believed not to break intranet or db/fileserver expected behaviors, develop or contribute to network problems, or cause the phones to catch on fire. No purchases are involved for the end-user employees, nor is the "marketplace" open to the public, so it's really not a "market," just a repository. The military version will probably involve a bit more on the vetting side, and there will probably be an effort to prevent end-users from circumventing the "marketplace" to install XXXm4t4h4r1XXXluvjajaja.app from some Chinese porn site they heard about from the grunts in the next tent. A marketplace for military phones is an excellent idea; this is not the security problem you think it is, nor is it going to ever be publicly visible.
There isn't a single phone on the market that runs "Android" - there are dozens of different models that each run some OS that is 99% android and 1% something else (if nothing else device drivers - the open source version of Android can't actually run on any production phone).
Apple is a bit different since they sell a phone, and not an operating system.
When the Army puts this out for bid it won't be to an OS vendor - it will be to a phone vendor (yes, I know Google owns Motorola). Whether or not Android 4 addresses this issue out of the box you can bet that vendors responding to the bid will factor in the need to address this feature if it is in the RFP.
When the Military standardizes it won't be on iOS or Android - it will be on Vendor A model B. I suspect that even if they picked Apple they wouldn't be buying the consumer product per se.
Every single attempt the Army has made to give its soldiers the same capabilities as a 13 year-old girl with an iPhone in 2007 has produced hilarious results. There was Future Force Warrior, Future Soldier, a dozen versions of Land Warrior, which were rolled into half a dozen versions of Nett Warrior. Nett Warrior -- the most recent attempt to waste gobs of taxpayer money -- is notable for producing this marvel of design elegance.
I give you, the Nett Warrior End User Device :
Believe it or not, that's the smallest, lightest, and most elegant system the Army has come up with yet. It's the first device to break with their tradition of attaching as many awkwardly shaped objects as possible to the soldier's head.
I can't wait to see how our brilliant and effective military contracting system interprets the smartphone.
As a former soldier I can tell you this: there is no coherent strategy. This is almost certainly 80-90% fail.
For non-deployed soldier, there is no need for a government issued smartphone because, just like everyone else, soldiers own personal smartphones already.
Unless of course, the phone is used only for official business and the government doesn't trust your personally owned phone with it.
While you're deployed it's different, mainly in that your own phone probably won't work, since there are no cell towers around and/or the towers are incompatible.
So, for any of this to work at all, either the Army has make its signal units run their own movable cell basestations, or they need to buy phone service from the host country.
Also, the phones will be so stuffed with Army bloatware and locked down with security and overbuilt big and heavy for ruggedness that they will be essentially useless.
And then after purchasing them, the Army will try to keep using the same crap phones for a 5-10 year lifecycle while the rest of the phone world marches on with Moore's law.
And since the purchasing contract system makes things really expensive they will probably try to save money by only buying enough for the high-ranking officers and NCOs, and for the elite units, but none for the normal soldiers. And on the off chance that your unit does get enough to go around, your commander will keep them locked in a container to prevent loss, damage and theft, because they're too expensive to risk actually using them.