Android Thoughts: Army Goes Android!

"The Army is 20 years and a half-billion dollars into a star-crossed effort to build custom communications and digital-mapping gadgets for its soldiers. Special Operations Command, on the other hand, is taking a simpler approach: They're planning to use Android phones. Last week, the SOCOM asked coders to create a suite of applications for keeping commandos linked up while they're out on missions. The software should include chat functions, file transfers, video display and "multi-touch whiteboarding aka John Madden tool." SOCOM calls it the Tactical Situational Awareness Application Suite, or TactSA, and it has to work in low-connectivity areas - the middle-of-nowhere places you'd expect to send the military's most elite troops. It's got to be peer-to-peer, encrypted "at the application level" and able to recover from "network outages and substantial packet loss." But rather than go the Army route and custom-build hardware, SOCOM is happy to use off-the-shelf gadgetry. It's the software that interests them more."

I guess it's telling - first you see your brother-in-law (who is a 1LT currently in Afghanistan) using a Droid at Christmas time, and before long he's convinced his entire company to adopt Android! Seriously, Android makes a logical choice for the Army: They can control the entire operating system, since it's open source, and build exactly what they need. Not a bad idea - let the hardware be off-the-shelf, program all the software!