The military Droid framework is known as Mobile/Handheld Computing Environment (CE).
"Using the Mobile /Handheld CE Product Developers Kit, we're going to allow the third-party developers to actually develop capabilities that aren't stovepiped," says Lt-Col Mark Daniels. Daniels is in charge of the Joint Battle Command-Platform (JBC-P) handheld device, which is essentially a military Droid phone: it is expected to be issued to US Army and Marine ground units from 2013.
The colonel says that the mobile/handheld CE dev kit will be released in July. Before that point the Army will develop certain core apps that will come with every handset, to include mapping, so-called Blue Force Tracking (displaying where friendly units are in order to avoid "friendly fire" incidents), TIGR map-marking and messaging. According to Daniels there will also be an address book and OpenOffice for document viewing.
"It's like when you get an iPhone and you have the Apple-made apps: the contacts, the email," says J Tyler Barton, Army app engineer. "Then other applications are free to use those apps, or to go above and beyond that."
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Cyber Defense
The US military is preparing for 21st Century electronic warfare and cyber terrorism. A joint US Cyber Command and four service cyber commands have been set up.
Their mission is to defend American military networks and civilian American infrastructure from cyber terrorism and from foreign government hackers.
The officers leading these cyber commands explain how they are organized, how they operate, and how they will protect the United States from foreign military hackers, intelligence agencies, and cyber terrorists.
13,450 words
