Calm yourselves, defense bureaucrats. The Pentagon isn’t about to swap out your BlackBerries for the latest iPhones and iPads.
That, however, was the promise of anonymous “well-placed sources” in an eye-opening Electronista story Wednesday. Those sources said the Pentagon was on the verge of phasing out “nearly all” of the hundreds of thousands of BlackBerries issued to its employees, and replacing them with some 650,000 iPhones, iPads and iPod touches.
“There is no truth to this claim,” says Air Force Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s new mobility initiative. “We are not looking to replace those 470,000 BlackBerries with the systems they claim we’re looking to order.”
Big caveat: The military’s new “mobility” plan may lead troops and Pentagon civilians to get secured Apple smartphones and tablets. Ditto for Android devices. And Windows devices. “And let’s not leave RIM out of that picture,” John Hickey, the mobility program manager for the Defense Information Systems Agency, told reporters last month.
Ultimately, what the Pentagon wants is a “variety of devices,” as the mobility plan’s catchphrase puts it, and, quite possibly, a variety of operating systems powering them. The Defense Department is still shopping around, and a decision on whether it wants to throw all its mobility eggs in the basket of a single operating system is months away. Mobile companies won’t even get the Pentagon’s new data-security guidelines for another 90 days.
It would certainly be something for the Defense Department to place a huge order with Cupertino for more than half a million expensive iOS devices in the ostensible age of austerity wrought by mandated congressional budget cuts. Thus far, Android devices have the edge for the piecemeal mobile purchases that the armed services, and especially the Army, have made.
Admittedly, those cuts aren’t stopping the Pentagon from spending roughly $1 billion on a mere 14 missile interceptors bound for Alaska, nor convincing the Air Force that maybe it shouldn’t spend money on a fantasy football league. But the Defense Department has moved into the age of mobile computing very, very slowly, and going high-end during a time when it’s crying poverty is an invitation to criticism on Capitol Hill and elsewhere.
“Every couple weeks, there’s another report that we’re abandoning BlackBerries, and that is just so far from the truth,” Pickart adds. Someone still loves you, company-formerly-known-as-RIM. LINK
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