NYTimes
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/16/the-iphone-goes-to-war/?ref=technology
December 16, 2009, 1:10 pm
The iPhone Goes to War
By ROY FURCHGOTT
Is the iPhone going to war?
On Wednesday at the 2009 Intelligence Warfighting Summit in Tucson, Raytheon, the military
contractor, announced an iPhone application that tracks friends and foes, shows
their positions on live, real time maps and provides secure communications.
Called the One Force Tracker, the Raytheon iPhone software can also be used
by first responders like police, firemen, and emergency medical technicians.
The app is completely operative and works on a standard iPhone, said J
Smart, chief technology officer for Raytheon’s Intelligence and
Information Systems. “We are really delighted to be leveraging Apple’s innovation.”
The adaptation of the iPhone to military use is somewhat unusual, as
technology more often trickles from the military to the consumer market. But
this is a rare case of consumer hardware and software concepts being adapted
for military use.
For instance, crowdsourcing, which has volunteers use cellphones to report
real-time traffic flow, could be adapted to turn each soldier into a reporting
unit, delivering real-time data about position and status.
Communications resemble social sites like Facebook, in which your friends would
be represented by a military unit, and could be used to track position of, and
communicate with, other units.
Maps with an overlay of points of interest are familiar to every GPS user.
The Raytheon app would use the same concept, but points of interest might be known
sniper sites or safe fallback positions.
Field information would be transmitted back to a central computer that would
crunch the data, update it and push it back out to the soldiers. “This is
hypothetical, but if there is a building with known terrorist activities, it
could automatically be pushed to the phone when the soldiers get near that
area,” said Mr. Smart.
Live information could also be used to reduce tactical errors and friendly
fire incidents. “If there was another platoon that was supposed to
arrive, and they were delayed, or ahead of schedule, you could adapt your
plan,” said Mr. Smart. “If one of the units you are counting on is
redirected, you know that in real time.”
Mr. Smart also said that Raytheon was developing sensors that could be attached
to phones so that they would serve other purposes. He declined to give
specifics, however mobile phones have been outfitted as portable ultrasound
machines, which would be useful for battlefield medicine.
Although the application that Raytheon has developed will work with an
off-the-shelf iPhone, the company concedes that there would have to be
alterations for the battlefield.
One iPhone limitation to be addressed is that it only carries out one
function at a time unlike competing systems from Palm and Google, which can run several
concurrently. If a soldier is to have position automatically reported, the GPS
will have to run at the same time as other applications. Mr. Smart said it
would be an easy adaptation to make. “Underneath the iPhone is a Mac OS X
operating system which is based on Unix, which gives us Unix
multitasking,” he said.
But that raises another issue. Apple limits multitasking because it empties
the batteries quickly. Because the iPhone doesn’t have a replaceable
battery, a fresh one can’t be popped in when power gets low. Mr. Smart
said that Raytheon may address that through a ruggedized phone case that would
accommodate a larger battery.
Mobile phones are also known to be vulnerable to hacking attacks. Mr. Smart
said that some safeguards were built in to the software, but especially
sensitive transmissions could be passed through a more sophisticated scrambler
that it would dock with.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
Raytheon is developing other iPhone apps as well. It has also demonstrated
an application that would serve to train air traffic controllers. It would not
completely replace current training, but would build skills in recalling
aircraft and terrain, visual scanning, on-the-fly mathematics, and rule-based
decision-making, skills that also are used frequently by gamers.