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发帖数: 16371 | 1 WSJ:
Leading his platoon on a mission to clear a hostile village in Afghanistan
last year, U.S. Army Lt. Kevin Pelletier took a small tablet computer along
with his gun, body armor and radio.
The hardened version of the five-inch Dell Streak developed by the Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency contained a custom application with Google
-like maps based on satellite images. Lt. Pelletier used it to update the
precise location of fellow soldiers engaged in a fight with two dozen
insurgents.
During a battle in a village near Kandahar, Afghanistan, Lt. Kevin Pelletier
used a tablet computer with a custom map application to direct soldiers'
movements. Here, a screenshot from one of the military's apps.
As thousands of rounds flew through the village near Kandahar, Lt. Pelletier
used the device to more quickly direct the movement of his soldiers. Two
days later, the village was cleared with zero casualties.
"It helped you orient weapons in a firefight," says Lt. Pelletier, a platoon
leader in the 10th Mountain Division. "Without a doubt it helped cut
casualties."
Ever since Apple Inc. AAPL +0.21% introduced the iPhone in 2007, consumers
have lined up for the chance to carry phones that amount to pocket computers
, providing both Internet access and specialized software. Now the military
wants to get in on the act.
Darpa, the defense research arm that contributed to the development of the
Internet, has launched an effort called Transformative Apps under which it
has developed a few dozen smartphone applications that work on a number of
mobile devices it is evaluating. In addition to mapping, the apps can do
things like identify explosives and weapons and help navigate parachute
drops.
Darpa has also launched three programs aimed at developing fixed and mobile
wireless networking systems working with traditional defense contractors
such as BAE Systems BA.LN +1.85% PLC and SAIC Inc., SAI +3.39% as well as
start-ups such as Invincea Inc. and colleges including Carnegie Mellon
University and George Mason University.
The idea is to create a more pervasive military wireless network and use it
to connect drones and other sensors and relay real-time video down to mobile
devices in the battlefield. Contracts for the networking projects are being
given out this year.
All told, Darpa is spending about $50 million this fiscal year on such
initiatives—peanuts compared with its own budget of nearly $3 billion, not
to mention overall military spending. But the hope is to build prototypes
that can soon be transferred to the Army and become official programs used
by hundreds of thousands of soldiers.
Darpa started handing out Dell Streak 5 tablets—which failed to catch on in
the commercial market and were pulled last summer—to Lt. Pelletier's
brigade in the spring of 2011, and it has since issued devices from other
makers. More than 1,000 soldiers in Afghanistan now use the technology as it
continues to be rolled out to brigades. Mari Maeda, who heads up the apps
initiative, expects to provide the capability to all U.S. Army units in
Afghanistan.
Darpa scientists say commercial communication capabilities surpassed
military capability in the late 1990s. The challenge now is to rapidly adapt
civilian technology to the unique circumstances of the military, which
often has to operate over large and hostile areas with little to no
communications infrastructure. The technology also has to be secure from
hacking.
Capt. Max Ferguson of the 10th Mountain Division says Darpa worked closely
with soldiers on the smartphone program and tried to understand their needs.
Early bugs were worked out by embedding engineers with units at their
patrol bases. When troops returned from battle, they told the engineers what
worked and what didn't work, and the engineers fixed the devices.
"They started to slowly pass them out to leaders," he says. "It became so
popular and so handy so quickly the soldiers were eager to use it."
Sometimes, Darpa created apps on the fly. One, called WhoDat, let soldiers
take pictures and add notes to them so they could do virtual lineups on
patrol and collect intelligence more easily.
A function of the mapping app, called TransHeat, enabled soldiers to plot
their movements with a GPS tracker. Routes that were traveled over and over
again turned orange or red, alerting soldiers to take a different path to
reduce the risk of ambush. "You realized you spent too much time in one area
," Capt. Ferguson says.
But the technology has some limits. The phones weren't connected to the
military's encrypted communications network, so soldiers still had to carry
radios. There were also too many settings that needed to be customized. And
the batteries lasted only for a day, so soldiers had to carry spares.
Still, Lt. Pelletier says he hopes the Army will spread the technology. "The
sooner the better," he says. |
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