Army confirms battlefield smartphones tests began in December

FORT BLISS, TEXAS -- The Army started tests of smartphones in a battlefield environment last December and eyes fielding them to every soldier in a selected 3,500-person brigade within the next six months, Mike McCarthy, head of the smartphone project at the service's Brigade Modernization Command here, told Nextgov.

McCarthy declined to specify the theater of operations where the smartphones are being tested for security reasons, but last month Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said he expects deployment of smartphones to soldiers in Afghanistan "very, very soon."

McCarthy, whose formal title is director of operations for the Brigade Modernization Command, Mission Command Complex, said feedback on tests of 20 to 30 smartphones in theater have been positive and mirror the experience of 1,000 soldiers who have tested them here since last June as part of a project called Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications.

Col. Marisa Tanner, who co-heads the smartphone project with McCarthy, said applications already developed for the project takes basic but vital Army tasks and automates them, eliminating manual input of data easily pulled from the phones, such as time and location.

For example, sending an Army SPOT Report message, a concise narrative report of essential information covering tactical events or conditions, requires a soldier to first enter a 12-digit date-time group and a six-digit grid coordinate, a task that takes up time in a critical situation. Smartphones, which have their own built-in clocks and GPS receivers, automatically populate those fields in the SPOT Reports and other Army messages that require a time stamp and precise location information, Tanner said.

Medevac requests, whose timeliness can literally mean the difference between life and death for a wounded soldier, have also been simplified by a smartphone app developed for the Connecting Soldiers project, McCarthy said. The medevac application automatically populates six of the nine fields, including location, radio frequencies and terrain, requiring a soldier merely to fill in fields containing the name of the patient, physical condition and type of wound.

Tanner, whose formal title is chief of mission command capabilities for the Brigade Modernization Command, said another application called TAP (not an acronym) uses the smartphone screen to graphically represent information on "a bad guy" based on information drawn from intelligence databases.

The graphic representing that bad guy grows larger on the screen as intelligence confirms, for example, whether he is from a hostile village and whether he has been suspected of setting improvised bombs; then a tap on the screen brings up the underlying data, Tanner said.

Another Connecting Soldiers application will help soldiers communicate in languages other than English, McCarthy said, outputting translation audibly through the smartphone speaker and by text on its screen. The project already has an Arabic language application, McCarthy said, and he would like to find an affordable application that can translate Pashto and Dari, the main languages of Afghanistan.

Both McCarthy and Tanner are aware of the potential security risks involved with widespread smartphone use on the battlefield. But Tanner said the Connecting Soldiers project minimizes that risk by not storing any data on the phone itself, instead pulling it from remote, cloud computing databases. McCarthy acknowledged the built-in GPS receivers could make it easy for enemies to locate a soldier, but pointed out that "you can always turn it off."

Except in very limited circumstances, the Connecting Soldiers project does not plan the use of commercial cellphone carriers for the battlefield smartphone network, Tanner said, and instead will deploy its own base station and towers to help bolster security.

McCarthy said that to date, the project has been run on shoestring budget, and he'd like to keep it that way. Defense contractors have provided him with proposals that would requrre the expenditure "of a lot of money," he said, but he does not want to pursue proposals that would transform a $200 commercial gadget into a $2,400 Army-unique phone.

The Connecting Soldiers project received a major boost earlier this month when Gen. Martin Dempsey, commanding general of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, signed a memo putting it under control of Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., McCarthy said. Dempsey takes over as Army Chief of Staff on April 11.

This change will expand the scope and size of the project and put it on the path to becoming a program of record in the Army and no longer just an experiment, McCarthy said. He says he plans to remain intimately involved.