US ARMY WANTS TO EQUIP EVERY SOLDIER WITH iPHONE OR ANDROID SMARTPHONES

According to USA Today the U.S. Army wants to issue every one of its troops an iPhone or Android handset. It gets better as well, because they also want to absorb the cost of the monthly contract. This would be music to most soldier’s ears and for anyone’s ears for that matter, but whilst it sounds farfetched it’s all true.

Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) commented:

The Army would issue these smartphones just like any other piece of equipment a soldier receives. One of the options potentially is to make it a piece of equipment in a soldier’s clothing bag.

Apparently the Army has already issued smartphones to troops in the schoolhouse and garrison, or on post, in the hands of select students at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo, Fort Lee, Va, and at Fort Sill, Okla, under an Army run program called Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications (CSDA for short). The next step is to get these smartphones into combat and they are looking at ways in which the phones can be digitally put to good use.

One of the plans is to roll out wireless Common Access Card readers for the iPhone in January and for Android devices in April. Soldiers would then be able to secure access to e-mail, contacts and calendars. During battle the smartphones could let soldiers view real-time intelligence and video from the tech in the sky or use it to track friends or enemy placements using a dynamic map. All this will take some planning before the technology can be put into practice.

Vane concluded:

The technology is there, but the challenge will be to work through the policy issues of sharing data and information assurance. Army officials remain concerned of enemy forces hacking into the phones, but don’t want that fear to paralyze the use of these phones.

[Geek]