Army: Mobile apps for the military

The U.S. Army has the potential to become a large, if not the largest, consumer of mobile apps, for the military. A recent post by William Matthews on Defense News, “Apps that answer military needs“, describes various Army and other defense initiatives, such as:

• Apps for the Army competition, open to military and civilian Army employees
• Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications initiative to distribute smart phones with 50 test apps to 192 soldiers at Fort Bliss & White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico
• The Raytheon Android Tactical System (RATS) app for the Android to track buddies on-screen – this is reminiscent of Garmin’s ability to do the same on their GPS devices
• DARPA’s Transformative Apps solicitation to improve the DoD’s ability to design, develop, & deploy mobile apps

Challenges & the way forward One of the challenges with the “race to mobile apps” is not too unlike the “race to networks” initiative, and perhaps that is the motivation behind the DARPA initiative. When networks first came out, they were new, exciting, and promised a new world of interoperability that is now referred to using the over-utilized mantra “net-centric” operations. However, in the race to network, different units used different networks, and troops, airmen, sailors, and marines found themselves maintaining the network more than executing their mission. Similar happenings occurred in the civilian sector, and hence we saw the rise of TCP/IP, standards, IT shops, and more. In the military, although IT networks are now commonplace, battlefield connectivity still remains a challenge and is often dependent on unique standards (TRI-TAC, Link-16, WIN-T, etc.).

The same challenge now exists for military mobile computing,

where multiple devices, world-wide phone standards, cross-domain classification, and user interface standards issues abound. In addition, whereas networks only offered “one” capability, the ability for a multitude of applications to communicate, mobile devices offer a multitude of capabilities – accelerometers, displays, microphone/speaker, GPS, wi-fi, and a host of other services available on most modern devices. Thus, a multitude of opportunities to exist to capitalize on such apps for military purposes, as evident in the many other mobile app activities in addition to those described in William Matthews’ post, such as:

• Transition opportunities, thus satisfying a key objective of most government contracting efforts (such as this current SBIR topic, SB 102-002, Handheld Apps for Warfighters, from DARPA)
• DARPA’s GUARD DOG effort, BAA DARPA-SN-10-36
• DARPA’s Mobile Apps for the Military initiative, RFI DARPA-SN-10-27
• & DARPA’s Enhancing Tactical Information Access add-on effort for TIGR, BAA DARPA-SN-10-35
• This effort and others by ONR, AFRL, and other military research agencies, to include at least one dissertation from NPS
• For more, see other posts on mobile computing