News - South Korea develops Android apps for the battlefield

[HEXUS]

Nine apps completed with more in the pipeline.

Read more.

[MrNeil]

Troop and military unit tracking combined with GPS !!!

Hope thats a joke ? Only takes one person to leave there phone on and one person to hack these phones and eliminate a sqaud or worse !Phones on the battlefield for me is a big no no !

[cameronlite]

Plus GPS can be jammed for <£60.

[blueball]

Worse than jamming GPS is "walking it off". We used to mess about doing that by partly jamming a signal and then making it believe it was somewhere else, very easy and just as cheap.

[aidanjt]

Android armed troopers?

[OilSheikh]

Android armed troopers?

Mate, you have issues. You use that pic everywhere, regardless of whether it applies to the situation or not!

[aidanjt]

Mate, you have issues. You use that pic everywhere, regardless of whether it applies to the situation or not!

Pfft.. once or twice is hardly 'everywhere'. And this so totally applies.

[crossy]

Troop and military unit tracking combined with GPS !!! Hope thats a joke ? Only takes one person to leave there phone on and one person to hack these phones and eliminate a sqaud or worse !Phones on the battlefield for me is a big no no !

Erm, it's doesn't say that the phone app is also using the phones GPS. For all we know it could be just tying into a military receiver which, so you'd hope, would be a lot more resistant to tampering by The Brilliant Leader's troops. At least you'd assume that the South Korean army would have taken that into consideration.
Getting back to the article - why is a smartphone app suite necessarily a bad thing? Battlefields are becoming more digital, so replacing a custom (and therefore VERY expensive) personal system with a widely available (and therefore very CHEAP) smartphone seems like a good piece of lateral thinking to me. Especially if that commodity item is actually made in the same country, so saving on ship costs and presumably getting a really nice price, (no company wants to be seen to be "unpatriotic").
Sure ComSec might be threatened by every squaddie having a mobile on his person, then again, I remember a comment from an Iraq War commander that a signal being sent via a military w/t was definitely "hostile" whereas a mobile phone call could been an innocent civilian.

Several months ago HEXUS ran a story about the US Army using smartphones in the battlefield. Since then it has transpired they have also chosen Android handsets “because Apple was unwilling to provide the government with access to the platform's source code”.

Hmm, obviously Apple were quite happy to turn away the Pentagon, (and more especially their big procurement budgets!), although I thought I remember reading that one (or more?) US government agencies (NSA?) already had a copy of the iOS source code...

Maybe Android is Skynet v1...

[wtfitskeagan]

What's going on!? Did they finally get bored with Starcraft II!?

[this_is_gav]

[superlattice09]

Are they using custom rom or stock one?