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Army turns smart phones into weapons
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/jan/24/soldiers-on-battlefield-turn-apps-into-arms/
The Army is mobilizing — in a 21st-century kind of way.

Soldiers armed with smart phones are finding new ways to fight and subsequently redefining the battlefield. They can share intelligence and translate languages with what amounts basically to the common cell phone.

“This isn’t the future. This is now,” said Lt. Col. Greg Motes of the Army Signal Center at Fort Gordon, Ga.

Controlling fighter jets, tanks, missiles and machine guns is another way to use the devices, Col. Motes said. Smart phones also could be used for facial recognition to spot enemies and fingerprinting to identify prisoners.

“All that technology could easily be put into a phone,” Col. Motes said.

Staff Sgt. Reag Wood (left) and Spc. Michael Torrez are members of the Army Evaluation Task Force, which assesses smart phone technologies for use in new training approaches and operational environments. (Annie Gammell/Special to The Washington Times)
Field tests show that popular consumer mobile devices, such as the iPhone and Android, are durable enough to withstand the rigors of combat. Many soldiers already bring their phones overseas and keep them anywhere they can find a spot — strapped to their arms, legs, helmets and even weapons.

“The soldiers, they protect these phones like they’re a weapon,” said Col. Marisa Tanner, chief of the doctrine, organization, operational architecture and threat division at Future Force Integration Directorate at Fort Bliss, Texas. “They’ll have it on their bodies at all times.”

The trend is becoming so popular that there is talk of issuing a smart phone to each soldier at enlistment. That vision is still a few years away, Col. Motes said, but the Army already has started the process by setting a goal of giving phones to some soldiers by the end of the year.

The biggest hurdle for soldiers is not the pervasiveness of the phones, but rather harnessing the existing technology. To combat that, the Army has started creating custom applications, or “apps.” The apps are key, but the quickness of their development relies on addressing security issues and gaining funding.

“We have to have people in our population who are capable of doing this,” Col. Motes said. “We’ve got to catch up. There needs to