Army Develops Android-Based Framework For Battlefield Ops 80
gabbo529 writes "The United States Army is developing an Android-based smartphone framework and suite of applications for tactical operations. With the marriage between technology and military continuing to strengthen, more soldiers are getting phones for on-the-field operations. Already, the military has developed the Joint Battle Command-Platform, or JBC-P Handheld, which has an app that can be used to mark warning signals to future soldiers."
Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Without commenting on any military technology I don't understand anyway, it is theoretically possible to do relatively narrow-beam communications to a repeater in the sky, e.g. a satellite or an AWACS. But most of the time the bad guys know nominally where we are, and since we mostly bomb poor people with a pretty lousy military they wouldn't have the technology to figure out where individuals are and target them... yet. I'd guess these systems actually do just use broadcast communications but it's simply not an issue... yet.
Re:Question (Score:4, Interesting)
My guess is that the tactical versions of all of this will use a frequency hoping radio in the "phone" and a dedicated military tower infrastructure with encryption. We already have the equivalent of mobile cell towers that can be put up or dropped in thirty minutes or so. There's almost certainly a lot more to this than a few Android apps, but using Android as the base OS on the portable soldier carried device will save a lot of development work.
Write drivers for the Android kernel that abstract away the specialty radio hardware, and suddenly you can do secure tactical communication software development using the same tools that make Angry Birds. better still this stuff can be tested, proof of concepted, even trained on back in the US using cheap commercial hardware, then put on ruggedized equipment with more secure radio hardware in theater.