The next big customer for smartphones and tablets? The U.S. military. Finally.
The military has begun talks with device and mobile operating-system manufacturers, as well as the major carriers, to supply troops with secured mobile devices. The idea is for the manufacturers to offer the Pentagon an already-secure device and OS, rather for the military to laboriously build a bespoke mobile suite that inevitably won’t keep pace with commercial innovation.
And the military has a significant amount of purchasing power on its side: hundreds of thousands of customers for the winning bid.
The architects of the Pentagon’s new Commercial Device Mobile Implementation Plan, unveiled Tuesday, want to be clear they’re not talking about soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines all buying, say, an iPhone 5 — and being stuck with it for years after the companies come out with improved, upgraded mobile products. And they’d prefer to let the troops pick from a selection of secured, approved smartphones and tablets, not issue everyone a mobile device like they issue rifles.
“We’re device-agnostic,” Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Wheeler, the Pentagon’s deputy chief information officer, told reporters. “What we’re looking for is a family of devices that are available depending on the operator. … And we’re going to continue to update as they update.”
That’s going to be a significant change from the top-down way the Pentagon often buys hardware. The Pentagon plan calls for giving security guidelines to the mobile companies, from secure to classified — data-security standards that have been worked out with the National Security Agency — and then shopping around for the best family of products that can meet the standard. It’s going to publish those security guidelines, for both devices and for the mobile applications they’ll run, within 120 days.
“Instead of the government, or defense contractors supporting the government, getting an operating system and then doing all the reviews to lock it down,” said John Hickey, the mobility program manager for the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Pentagon’s “concept now is: here’s our security requirements to operate within DOD, you bring us the [Security Technical Implementation Guides] and we review it very quickly.”
The sheer volume of customers that the Pentagon represents is supposed to control costs, the plan’s architects figure. Already, 600,000 department employees are using mobile devices, the overwhelming majority of which are RIM’s Blackberry. Hickey said a “mixture” of companies are already interested in getting that big market.
“On the device side, if you’re talking about the operating system on the device, it would be the Samsungs, the Apples, et cetera, the ones that are really running the operating systems,” Hickey said, declining to elaborate much. “And let’s not leave RIM out of that picture, with BB10 coming.”
This is something the Army in particular wants badly. It spent over a decade building a data network to push mapping and other information to dismounted soldiers — a network currently in use, for the first time, in Afghanistan — and recent rolled out a smart device (it doesn’t make calls) called Nett Warrior, running Android, to operate over it. The Army also built an app store, still in beta, so soldiers can access the apps they’ll run on the devices. The new Pentagon-wide plan calls for building a military app store by 2014.
And it’s not just the Army. The Navy and the Marines are sending their first ship-to-ship wireless network to sea this spring, and purchasing hundreds of phones from the local electronics store to use it. The Air Force’s early experiments with smartphones and tablets involves turning heavy, on-paper flight kits into apps.
The plan doesn’t call for signing on with one particular carrier: that’s impractical, since that the military operates globally. The Pentagon has also yet to decide whether all the approved smartphones and tablets will run the same operating system, although it’s worth noting the smartphones and tablets the military has purchased so far have typically been Android devices.
All this represents a potential windfall for mobile companies, even with cuts to the defense budget looming. The military not only wants to automate data and put it in troops’ pockets, it wants to keep pace with the gadgets that troops use in their civilian lives — a big reason why the Pentagon doesn’t want to build a bespoke device.
Buying the devices isn’t going to be the only challenge. Securing them is going to be another. Hickey acknowledged that the Pentagon’s got to make choices about how much sensitive or classified data can live on devices that troops can easily lose and how much needs to live on a secured cloud. Another is just teaching the military the basics about what mobile technology is.
“Everyone thinks of, ‘devices,’” Wheeler said. “For someone whose job it is to work this all the time, as an aviator, I’m thinking ‘device.’ I’m not thinking the [data-management requirements], I’m not thinking the actual applications, I’m not thinking the OS and I’m not thinking the device. But all of those are part of the security solution. And that was something difficult for some of the leaders to get their hands around.” LINK
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