US Army's Special Operations switching tactical kit from Android to iPhone - report

Posted:
in iPhone edited July 2016
The U.S. Army's Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, will be switching from Android to the iPhone for a situational awareness kit issued to soldiers, according to a report.




The iPhone 6s will be the centerpiece of gear dubbed the iPhone Tactical Assault Kit, a source told Military.com's DoD Buzz. The equipment is replacing the Android Tactical Assault Kit -- both systems link a smartphone to a networked radio, letting unit leaders track soldiers' positions on a map, as well as connect to intelligence and reconnaissance feeds such as video from drones.

While the Army has confirmed neither the switch nor its reasons, one explanation for it may be reliability. The particular Samsung phone used in the Android kit freezes and too often has to be restarted, the source commented. The issue is said to be especially evident when trying to view a split screen showing both a unit's route and a drone feed.

The iPhone is described as "faster," "smoother," and "seamless" by comparison, with graphics that are "clear, unbelievable."

Apple gear has been used in one form or another by the American military for years. Older models of the iPod touch, for instance, were used as computers for snipers.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 20
    rob53rob53 Posts: 3,241member
    Finally, someone with sense in the US military. I'm surprised they aren't considering changing to a Windows phone. The iPhone and iPad have been certified by NIST for use by government agencies and my latest report is that the only Android phone that's been approved is a Samsung phone running Knox, which I believe has been shown to be defective. Of course, the Army doesn't have to comply with anything they don't want to, just like the rest of the government, but this rumor could be good for Apple and be used as a selling point for all those people who look at the US military as providing the best way to do everything.

    --Yes, there was a hint of sarcasm but I do see this rumor as being helpful to Apple especially since Samsung is NOT an American company and there still are some procurement rules that have to be followed when buying any non-American product although I bet the US government sees Samsung as a US company because everyone knows Apple is just a niche company so those buy American rules don't matter. There are also sole-source and no-substitute procurement rules. I wonder how Samsung beat out Apple, probably only on cost but when has that ever stopped the military on anything?
    jbdragonmagman1979doozydozenjony0
  • Reply 2 of 20
    Not surprised. My galaxy note 5 ran extremely slow, and it was full of bloteware. I'm wondering what model are they using?
  • Reply 3 of 20
    rob53rob53 Posts: 3,241member
    Did some more research on this trying to find out which Samsung they are currently using. There's a lot of information on this project, including presentations saying iOS support would be coming.
    http://www.wow.com/wiki/Nett_Warrior (shows some history)

    --
    In July 2013, the Army installed the Samsung Galaxy Note II into Nett Warrior as the system's end user device. Each Galaxy is bought at the commercial price of $700 per phone, substantially lower than if the Army had to procure devices from contractors who would develop their own original devices.

    On 14 October 2014, the U.S. Army Geospatial Center recommended AFRL's Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK), over the world-leader Esri's Commercial Joint Mapping Tool Kit (CJMTK)NASA's World Wind, and the Army's Globe Engine (AGE) for map engine driving the Nett Warrior End User Device. ATAK was selected due to similar capabilities with CJMTK, similar risk, and less than one-third the total cost.
    --
    So much for those people saying Apple products are overpriced. 
    doozydozenmuppetryjony0
  • Reply 4 of 20
    MacProMacPro Posts: 19,718member
    They can use their old Android phones for target practice.
    fotoformatsricemwhitemagman1979doozydozenericthehalfbeejony0
  • Reply 5 of 20
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    Surprised that the military are using consumer grade kit at all. I'd have expected them to be using less capable but more reliable custom hardware.
  • Reply 6 of 20
    rob53rob53 Posts: 3,241member
    crowley said:
    Surprised that the military are using consumer grade kit at all. I'd have expected them to be using less capable but more reliable custom hardware.
    Me too but after reading the WOW article I referenced above, it appears the Army bean counters are finally having to do their job and make judgment calls based on cost instead of simply bilking the taxpayers out of a lot of money.
    doozydozen
  • Reply 7 of 20
    techguy911techguy911 Posts: 269member
    crowley said:
    Surprised that the military are using consumer grade kit at all. I'd have expected them to be using less capable but more reliable custom hardware.
    The DoD has been moving away from custom hardware/software and towards commercial solutions for at least the past 15 years.  It's probably still cheaper for them to buy double or triple the number of iPhones/iPads as spares to cover more frequent damage then designing some custom device that costs 10x the price.
    chiajony0
  • Reply 8 of 20
    Mike WuertheleMike Wuerthele Posts: 6,858administrator
    The US military began a shift to COTS (commercial off the shelf) for a lot of things that they'd develop custom hardware for about 20 years ago. There are an enormous number of things now that are using it, and its saved millions of dollars, believe it or not. Plus, repair can be as easy as a swap like-for-like, as opposed to a component level repair, which can take a great deal of time.
    jony0mac fan
  • Reply 9 of 20
    crowleycrowley Posts: 10,453member
    It's not so much the cost of hardware replacement as the cost of in-the-field failure that I'd be concerned about.

    But hey, whatever greases the wheel.
  • Reply 10 of 20
    jameskatt2jameskatt2 Posts: 720member
    Security is Military Grade for the iPhone.  It is also FBI Proof.  Samsung Phones can easily be cracked by ISIS. 
    mwhitemagman1979badmonkjony0
  • Reply 11 of 20
    apple ][apple ][ Posts: 9,233member
    Our military soldiers deserve the best, so the only logical choice is obviously Apple.

    Let the terrorists and foreign armies use cheap and unreliable Android trash, while our Apple using soldiers blow them all to smithereens.

    Apple could even make a special, heavy duty, stronger built iPhone, specially developed for the US military. Instead of Rose Gold, how about stealth black or a camo phone?

    I'd actually love a stealth black iPhone for myself. :#
    mwhitebadmonkdoozydozenjony0
  • Reply 12 of 20
    stevehsteveh Posts: 480member
    crowley said:
    Surprised that the military are using consumer grade kit at all. I'd have expected them to be using less capable but more reliable custom hardware.
    In general, the approach is to go for custom hardware if reliability/ruggedness is paramount, COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) hardware where it can do the job adequately. In some cases there just isn't any commercial product that can do a given job, but that's less common than in the past.
  • Reply 13 of 20
    stevehsteveh Posts: 480member

    rob53 said:
    Me too but after reading the WOW article I referenced above, it appears the Army bean counters are finally having to do their job and make judgment calls based on cost instead of simply bilking the taxpayers out of a lot of money.
    A lot of the high cost of dedicated military kit is cooked into the equipment by a combination of low (in relation to commercial products) production volumes, and the (really) high cost of the procurement process itself.

    Stories about things like $1K hammers tend to leave out the mandated testing process (you have to develop it, and the test equipment, and the verification process, and *everything* has to be documented, with an attached paper trail). All this drives up the cost of a product that might never see production numbers north of a couple of thousand.

    One favorite from times past was a lot of churn about the cost of a coffee urn for, IIRC, the Lockheed P-3 Orion naval patrol plane. Hey, you try working on an 18 hour patrol over the north Atlantic without hot coffee, or food for that matter.

    Some bright spark got the numbers and went quite non-linear back in the '80s. Why, that $40K urn could easily replace it with a coffee pot from Costco for $50, tops. What were they thinking about? Lockheed was ripping us off!!

    Well, the whole intensive procurement process (paperwork/test process/testing/validation/more paperwork) spread out over a few hundred aircraft. Oh, and the aircraft electrical buss(es) may or may not provide 120vac/60Hz directly. I vaguely recall one business jet that the ground school I worked at used had a couple of power busses, one providing 28v, another was at 400Hz. (Hey, it's been almost 50 years.)

    Someone I used to work with did a bit of digging, and noted that the Boeing 747 that his company operated used coffee urns that cost right about $40K, each, in the mid-70s.

    There's waste and excess cost in the system, but it's not *all* waste, and at least some of the people working in the system are definitely trying to reduce those costs.
  • Reply 14 of 20
    rob53rob53 Posts: 3,241member
    steveh said:

    rob53 said:
    A lot of the high cost of dedicated military kit is cooked into the equipment by a combination of low (in relation to commercial products) production volumes, and the (really) high cost of the procurement process itself.

    Stories about things like $1K hammers tend to leave out the mandated testing process (you have to develop it, and the test equipment, and the verification process, and *everything* has to be documented, with an attached paper trail). All this drives up the cost of a product that might never see production numbers north of a couple of thousand.

    One favorite from times past was a lot of churn about the cost of a coffee urn for, IIRC, the Lockheed P-3 Orion naval patrol plane. Hey, you try working on an 18 hour patrol over the north Atlantic without hot coffee, or food for that matter.

    Some bright spark got the numbers and went quite non-linear back in the '80s. Why, that $40K urn could easily replace it with a coffee pot from Costco for $50, tops. What were they thinking about? Lockheed was ripping us off!!

    Well, the whole intensive procurement process (paperwork/test process/testing/validation/more paperwork) spread out over a few hundred aircraft. Oh, and the aircraft electrical buss(es) may or may not provide 120vac/60Hz directly. I vaguely recall one business jet that the ground school I worked at used had a couple of power busses, one providing 28v, another was at 400Hz. (Hey, it's been almost 50 years.)

    Someone I used to work with did a bit of digging, and noted that the Boeing 747 that his company operated used coffee urns that cost right about $40K, each, in the mid-70s.

    There's waste and excess cost in the system, but it's not *all* waste, and at least some of the people working in the system are definitely trying to reduce those costs.
    Yes but not really. The procurement cost can be high but a lot of times it's the waste of time by the actual Procurement department. I spent a long time documenting our purchases, filling out the paperwork, doing testing and talking to vendors. When it went to the Procurement department, they spent a lot of coffee-break time doing nothing since everything was already done. My time was already paid for so it was never included in the cost of an item. As for mandated testing, a lot of testing is now done by NIST and others so we just had to produce implementation plans that included testing but again, these costs would never show up in those $1K hammers. I didn't work for DoD or the military so maybe my government installation was run a little better.  ;)
  • Reply 15 of 20
    schlackschlack Posts: 719member
    This is great. Much better security and quality. BUT...it's not quite fair for the DOD to compare a likely old Samsung phone to a likely new iPhone. Any phone would fail that test.
    doozydozen
  • Reply 16 of 20
    hucom2000hucom2000 Posts: 149member
    apple ][ said:

    Apple could even make a special, heavy duty, stronger built iPhone, specially developed for the US military. Instead of Rose Gold, how about stealth black or a camo phone?

    I'd actually love a stealth black iPhone for myself. :#
    Yea... I don't think Apple wants to make actual equipment for the US Army. Apple products are used all around the world. That would be way too political.
    pbrstreetg
  • Reply 17 of 20
    wood1208wood1208 Posts: 2,905member
    Everyone knows You can't put price on security. It's time USA militry take side with what is real secure and what is not. More comfortable with my tax dollar wisely used.
    edited July 2016
  • Reply 18 of 20
    Situational awareness kit... I think that is code for Pokemon Go detector app.
  • Reply 19 of 20
    stevehsteveh Posts: 480member
    rob53 said:
    steveh said:

    A lot of the high cost of dedicated military kit is cooked into the equipment by a combination of low (in relation to commercial products) production volumes, and the (really) high cost of the procurement process itself.

    ...

    There's waste and excess cost in the system, but it's not *all* waste, and at least some of the people working in the system are definitely trying to reduce those costs.
    Yes but not really. The procurement cost can be high but a lot of times it's the waste of time by the actual Procurement department.

        As I noted, there is certainly waste in the process.

    I spent a long time documenting our purchases, filling out the paperwork, doing testing and talking to vendors. When it went to the Procurement department, they spent a lot of coffee-break time doing nothing since everything was already done.

      The Procurement Process(tm) is more than a procurement department is terms of government acquisition.

    My time was already paid for so it was never included in the cost of an item. As for mandated testing, a lot of testing is now done by NIST and others so we just had to produce implementation plans that included testing but again, these costs would never show up in those $1K hammers. I didn't work for DoD or the military so maybe my government installation was run a little better.  ;)

      You may very well have been lucky in that respect. In the past few years I've had a sort of sideways look at part of the process, usually resulting in projects requiring multiply iterative processes, including development of testing methodologies and equipment (all of it emitting its own documentation stream including reams of required reports and meetings and ... and ...), especially if the desired result involves new/custom devices and software that has no current COTS solution. Even combined custom/COTS solutions only reduce that overhead a bit. (I'm just glad I don't have anything to do with those parts of the process.)

  • Reply 20 of 20
    cpsrocpsro Posts: 3,192member
    Sounds like my experience with Uber drivers who use Android handsets. (flaky performance)
    edited July 2016
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