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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/
Blackberry - designed by untrustworthy Canadians
Android - based on Linux which was written by communists
iPhone - designed by Apple in California
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).
And I always thought MS stood for unreliable...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
And field replaceable batteries. So that you can bring extras and swap them YOURSELF.
Without the need for specialized tools.
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.
There's an app for that!
They can be tracked complete with GPS and can be used to record sensitive information.
I have been reading Al Jazeera with the news of Libya last summer and cell phones were a problem. Basically loyalist spies would txt the GPS specs to Loyalists in Walid and Sirte, and whenever they went in the enemy was already there ambusing the rebels.
Even not I wonder how easy it is to hack them. China has a keen interest and have the best hacking elite group in the world that have inflitrated Los Almos and even satelites.
With Army equipment you know who made it and the ins and outs compared to a cell phone with knows what abilities it has obscured away.
http://saveie6.com/
Due to a design flaw, the Android root CA trust database cannot be changed without reflashing the phone in currently available versions of Android. Given the way the military handles their PKI, this makes existing Android devices infeasible. Android 4 is supposed to address this.
I don't think that 4 means what the United States Army apparently thinks it means...
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.
Not really unfeasible ... reflashing an Android phone really just requires selecting an image from an application and rebooting. It shouldn't be required, but it's a pretty trivial problem to resolve.
If it just makes calls, sends and receives text messages/emails, and has basic mapping and location function, and you don't mind it being substantially larger and uglier ("ruggedized") compared to current smart phones, then 240 hours is probably doable given current technology. Take something the size of an iphone or a bit larger and make it twice as thick, the extra space being entirely devoted to a battery. Hell, coat the back in a PV panel and you can charge it by just laying it out in the sun--no lack of that in the places we usually do our fighting. Cover the whole thing in some sort of rubber waterproof case.
Then charge the government $5k/unit and you're done :)
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
http://www.military.com/news/article/army-looks-to-smart-phone-for-nett-warrior.html
I seriously doubt that's going on in The App Store. In fact, apps can't access location functionality without your explicit consent. And you're notified in the location bar whenever that functionality is active. Apple is very proactive in enforcing their rules. If they let apps have their run of the hardware functions it would seriously effect battery life (something that's already been a problem).
And then there's sandboxing. An app can't access your contacts, for example. So as long as you're only getting your software from the App Store and not a jailbroke Cydia repo, you're going to be relatively safe. Now the question is, do you trust Apple?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
You do realize they're not going to walk into an Apple store or a Verizon store and order up 10,000 phones. These phones are going to be diverted right after manufacture (if not manufactured separately for additional hardening of components) and loaded up with the Army's own software package. And it'll still end up being cheaper than if they had put out a bid request for independently designed and built phones.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I don't know the exact details but it has. Very few people know for exactly what.
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.
It might just be me, but a touchscreen-only phone seems like it might be less than ideal for a soldier. I would think that actual buttons would be a better idea for people who might be wearing various types of hand gear in varied conditions.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
They will need to a plan with out the roaming fees that can be as high as $20 meg.
No problem. Just take over the damned country. Give the cell phone service to AT&T. Presto! Not roaming anymore.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
You do realize that purchasing commercial phones would be a lot cheaper than the military making their own system from scratch, right? Military tech is moving this direction anyway. Purchasing phones like this can allow squad leader to communicate in real time with multi-media such as maps and visual intel (photos, videos, etc) with platoon/company/battalion etc leadership. Not only would it make combat missions easier, but it will also greatly improve SAR and humanitarian operations capabilities, which is also a large part of what military units do (particularly units like National Guard-for domestic disasters- and MEUs-foreign disasters)
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
... there is only one choice: the Pip-Boy 3000! This is now a real thing, being developed by LG Display, Universal Display and L-3 Display Systems UDC, and tested in the field: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-10/15/wrist-mounted-computers How cool is that?
Awesome. Fire Direction simplified through a DOD port of Angry Birds.
You could have the different ordinance represented by the Founding Fathers and just swap the pigs out with a pic of the terrorist du jour.
Well, so far, Android hasn't opened up its source code, so the DoD would have to explicitly ask them to provide it. I doubt iPhone, since the DoD might prefer their own walled garden, rather than Apple's. M$ is out of the question, since they may not want standard PC apps from anywhere infecting their phones. Blackberry - doubtful, since they may not want to experience an outage if RIM's servers go down.
I'd honestly pay to see resulting conversations between pissed off soldiers and AT&T reps who have disconnected/throttled/generally sabotaged their connections for a variety of dubious reasons.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Not really unfeasible ... reflashing an Android phone really just requires selecting an image from an application and rebooting. It shouldn't be required, but it's a pretty trivial problem to resolve.
Military uses user based certs. This means that every time a user throughout the entire DoD organization is fired/quits/change jobs/changes names/etc. They have their certificate revoked. This means they are probably revoking hundreds of certificates per day. Generally, you need to update your CRLs about once a week at a minimum, though they prefer that applications use OCSP, where a query is sent in real time to the CA to see if the cert has been revoked for this reason. So, flashing isn't a very reasonable thing to do once a week or more, especially when the product takes an hour to flash.
In what way do you disagree with my usage of it? Most likely if they did pick Apple they'd get something close to the consumer model, but not quite the same. So, it is an "iPhone", but it really isn't, and that seems like an appropriate use of per se.
It might even be just an iPhone minus the EULA and warranty disclaimer paperwork in the box, but that still isn't quite the consumer model.
Per wikipedia a good synonym of "per se" is "without qualifications" - and I don't think they'll be using a consumer phone without qualifications.
What is the name of the big missile that targets the RF signal
from radar? So what keeps an RF signal seeking
missile or other device from causing problems.
A soldier should not have a smart phone or any other
radio linked phone while in the field. The RF signature of
a passive RF receiver IED trigger is so tiny...
Then there is the issue of cameras....
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.