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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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.