Platform lets Army send orders via smartphone

The Army has created a means to send mission-specific applications and data to soldiers’ mobile devices, via a “tactical marketplace” built to resemble the functionality of Apple’s App Store or the Android Market.

The critical difference is the platform, called Tacmark, also lets a designated commander or leader send applications to the devices of his subordinates, said Steven P. Mazza, of Handheld/Tactical Technology branch of the Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center’s Command, Power & Integration directorate.

“If you’re walking around here at Aberdeen [Proving Ground, Md.] or the Pentagon and you have a commercial tablet or smartphone, you can reach into Army’s enterprise marketplace, browse around and pick and choose what you want,” Mazza said. “But it doesn’t work that way when lives are on the line. When lives are on the line, people are issued things.”

Tacmark is built in-house at CERDEC. Its creators say it is complementary to the Army Software Marketplace launched in March, which today contains mostly commercial applications.

As with a commercial app store, Tacmark allows users to browse and post feedback — but it also allows applications to be pushed out to soldiers from above them in the chain of command.

“There are things you can pick for your device and things you need for your device,” said Johnathan Gilday, lead engineer on the project.

A squad leader, for instance, would log into a Tacmark client on a desktop or laptop computer to assemble a “mission pack” using a soldier-friendly user interface, adding and subtracting components as necessary.

The program, like a social network, allows the leader to identify subordinates on his team who would receive the mission pack. Subordinates can be assigned to teams, and assigned roles within those teams.

Tacmark has the ability to distribute commercial applications like those found on iTunes, proprietary government apps, image files and document files.

The policy on what exactly will be distributed still rests with the Army’s Office of the Chief Information Officer/G-6.

Also, just how these devices and the network will be fielded and secured are still open questions. However, the Tacmark will work regardless, Mazza said.

“The real win is that regardless of the transport, regardless of the device and the data, we have a framework that is very orthogonal on all those fronts,” Mazza said. “We can accommodate not just the Army’s needs now but a decade from now, when soldiers are carrying devices you won’t recognize.”

Tacmark’s creators told Army Times the technology is being considered to become part of either the Army’s Nett Warrior mobile computing platform, or one of the programs under Project Manager — Mission Command. The latter oversees a number of situational awareness and battle command systems.

CERDEC tested Tacmark last summer at Fort Dix, N.J., during a network modernization exercise, and it demonstrated the ability to provision Android devices with Android apps over Army cellular networks, Gilday said.

In the demonstration, a mission pack was assembled on a laptop and pushed to users carrying commercial devices, using a few Wi-Fi hubs and a Humvee carrying a portable cell tower developed by the Army.

“We exercised Tacmark, told people to go into the woods, and we exercised this over a couple of different network layers,” Mazza said. “We continued to ride over the top of this in a comms-agnostic matter, and it was a huge success.”

Tacmark is expected to undergo further user tests at an upcoming Network Integration Evaluation still to be determined. The NIE is the service’s semiannual process for rapidly fielding technology.

CERDEC is still refining how the system will work at the “tactical edge,” where bandwidth and network access are limited. “That remains one of the biggest hurdles, to continue to do it better and better,” Mazza said.

Its creators admit the software is not so much a cutting-edge program as it is a means to bring the Army in line with other commercially available applications. Building a mission pack will feel very familiar for a soldier, like filling an online shopping cart, they say.

“We had to look at industry best practices and survey what the industry leaders are doing, like Amazon, and they don’t let their secrets out easily,” Mazza said. “It was a lot of reverse-engineering.”

The point is not to reinvent the wheel but to mimic the look, feel and functionality of other programs that a young soldier might be used to using out of uniform.

“It works like most smartphone apps work; you get it right away,” Mazza said. “They’re purpose-built, and the marketplace looks like a marketplace.”

Odierno: Army’s focus in Africa on training

The Army is looking to preposition stocks of equipment to keep them close to potential global flashpoints and assist with multilateral training missions with partner nations.

One of the places critical to this new program is Australia, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said Wednesday during an appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.

“We’re working with the Australians where we can do multilateral training,” he said, adding that “one of the concepts we’re looking at, [is] putting prepositioned equipment there ... then bring countries from around the region in to conduct multilateral efforts.”

While not naming specific nations, Odierno said the Army is looking to do the same thing in Africa, adding that the train and advise mission is “going to be more and more important as we go forward” in a post-Iraq and Afghanistan era.

Army officials have already said that early plans call for about 11,000 MRAPs to be prepositioned around the globe.

Odierno said the Army’s role will likely shift toward performing more advisory missions, beginning with assigning a Brigade Combat Team to the AFRICOM command in 2013 to act as a pilot program for the Regionally Aligned Force concept, which aims to marry brigades with certain countries and regions to give units a deeper understanding of the culture and politics of different regions around the globe.

Africa is becoming increasingly important to the Army’s plans due in no small part to the fact that “terrorist elements around the world go to the areas they think has the least resistance,” the chief said, “and right now, you could argue that’s Africa.”

But just as the White House and the Pentagon begin to shift their gaze toward the Pacific region, and as the Air Force and the Navy push their Air-Sea Battle concept, the Army has been forcefully making the case that it also has an interest in the region.

One way of staying involved is through engagement and training efforts, including the prepositioned stocks plan. Odierno said that efforts to conduct multilateral training will focus “on the Pacific and other areas where we have not done that in the past.”

Odierno stressed that there are already 66,000 soldiers stationed in the Pacific area of operations, and because these troops no longer will be rotated in and out of Iraq and Afghanistan, “one of the first priorities I have is making sure that they remain dedicated to the Pacific region.”

As he has done repeatedly in recent months, Odierno reiterated that 22 of the 27 heads of their respective defense departments in the Pacific come from their land forces, and seven of the 10 largest armies are located in the Pacific region.

Closer to home, the chief said he is working to build on relationships between Special Operations Forces and big Army that were developed in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly on foreign advisory and weapons of mass destruction missions. The Army and SOF recently held exercises at Fort Polk, La., for the first time “in a very long time,” Odierno said, “and we have these planned throughout the year to work issues such as this. In the future I would foresee us doing a rotation that deals with WMD specifically and how we might deal with that and what the different scenarios might be.”

The exercise highlights an issue identified at the Unified Quest war game in early June at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. One participant, an Army colonel, complained that details of how SOF and general purpose forces should collaborate isn’t being integrated quickly enough into Army doctrine. The youngest officers coming out of school don’t have the joint experience from Iraq and Afghanistan that combat veterans possess, he said.

Stealth destroyer, at over $3 billion apiece, is US Navy’s latest answer to rising China

This file image released by Bath Iron Works shows a rendering of the DDG-1000 Zumwalt, the U.S. Navy’s next-generation destroyer, which has been funded to be built at Bath Iron Works in Maine and at Northrop Grumman’s shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss. The super-stealthy warship that could underpin the U.S. navy’s China strategy will be able to sneak up on coastlines virtually undetected and pound targets with electromagnetic “railguns” right out of a sci-fi movie.

A super-stealthy warship that could underpin the U.S. navy’s China strategy will be able to sneak up on coastlines virtually undetected and pound targets with electromagnetic “railguns” right out of a sci-fi movie.

But at more than $3 billion a pop, critics say the new DDG-1000 destroyer sucks away funds that could be better used to bolster a thinly stretched conventional fleet. One outspoken admiral in China has scoffed that all it would take to sink the high-tech American ship is an armada of explosive-laden fishing boats.

With the first of the new ships set to be delivered in 2014, the stealth destroyer is being heavily promoted by the Pentagon as the most advanced destroyer in history — a silver bullet of stealth. It has been called a perfect fit for what Washington now considers the most strategically important region in the world — Asia and the Pacific.

Though it could come in handy elsewhere, like in the Gulf region, its ability to carry out missions both on the high seas and in shallows closer to shore is especially important in Asia because of the region’s many island nations and China’s long Pacific coast.

“With its stealth, incredibly capable sonar system, strike capability and lower manning requirements — this is our future,” Adm. Jonathan Greenert, chief of naval operations, said in April after visiting the shipyard in Maine where they are being built.

On a visit to a major regional security conference in Singapore that ended Sunday, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said the Navy will be deploying 60 percent of its fleet worldwide to the Pacific by 2020, and though he didn’t cite the stealth destroyers he said new high-tech ships will be a big part of its shift.

The DDG-1000 and other stealth destroyers of the Zumwalt class feature a wave-piercing hull that leaves almost no wake, electric drive propulsion and advanced sonar and missiles. They are longer and heavier than existing destroyers — but will have half the crew because of automated systems and appear to be little more than a small fishing boat on enemy radar.

Down the road, the ship is to be equipped with an electromagnetic railgun, which uses a magnetic field and electric current to fire a projectile at several times the speed of sound.

But cost overruns and technical delays have left many defense experts wondering if the whole endeavor was too focused on futuristic technologies for its own good.

They point to the problem-ridden F-22 stealth jet fighter, which was hailed as the most advanced fighter ever built but was cut short because of prohibitive costs. Its successor, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, has swelled up into the most expensive procurement program in Defense Department history.

“Whether the Navy can afford to buy many DDG-1000s must be balanced against the need for over 300 surface ships to fulfill the various missions that confront it,” said Dean Cheng, a China expert with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research institute in Washington. “Buying hyperexpensive ships hurts that ability, but buying ships that can’t do the job, or worse can’t survive in the face of the enemy, is even more irresponsible.”

Military Times

Congress forcing Army to accept useless tanks

How much of the US Defense Department’s budget is wasted each year? If the Pentagon’s current proposal for 2013 gets approved as is, at least $91 million can more or less be trashed thanks to an order for 33 unneeded Army tanks.

The Senate Armed Service Committee has already approved the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013, and along with a handful of other military-related provisions are their spending requests for the DoD. Among billions of dollars’ worth of doo-dads and weaponry, however, sets a request for $91 million to procured nearly three dozen new M1A1 Abrams battle tanks made by General Dynamics.

To Congress, the proposal makes perfect sense. If you venture off of Capitol Hill and hound the guys at the Pentagon, though, you won’t hear the same answer: the US Army is adamantly opposed to any new tanks and is urging Congress to reconsider. And if their argument is continued to fall on deaf ears, the military might just be wasting more than just a few spare cents.

Speaking before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee only this past March, US Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno said that, not only does the United States not need any new tanks, but its current arsenal is far from antiquated — Business Insider reports that Army Secretary John McHugh called the military’s tank fleet one of the most modernized platforms in the Army and that the average vehicle is less than three years old.

As of right now, the Army intends on ending all Abrams purchasing in 2014 and then start upgrades only three years later. If Congress has their way, however, the Lima, Ohio General Dynamic production facility will stay open and continue to churn out millions’ worth of tanks for apparently no good reason.

Except for one, of course: the military industrial complex.

Ordering 33 new tanks will indeed waste nearly $100 million, warns the military top-brass. By ending production, though, the Pentagon stands to lose a powerful contractor. Last year, Army Secretary John McHugh told the defense subcommittee that, “In order to sustain the Abrams line at Lima, you have to produce at least 70 tanks a year.” Analysts working for the Army crunched numbers long enough , however, to eventually realize that it could cost upwards of $800 million to close the plant for a bit, versus around $3 billion to keep the plant up and running during the same span of time.

As Business Insider, reports, however, 33 new tanks would be just enough to keep the Abrams plant up at running “at minimum production capability” at a cost that keeps both the Pentagon and its pals in Ohio happy.

If that plan gets put in place, the only losers will be the American taxpayers, who will spend around $91 million on some heavy-duty toys to collect dust. That, of course, gives Uncle Sam yet another excuse to spend money: RT reported last year that the Defense Department is planning on spending around $115 billion over the next half decade just to keep tanks, trucks and planes in tip-top condition by keeping them clean and rust-proof, otherwise they may fall apart while left locked up.