By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11, 2013 – For the first time in any war,
U.S. soldiers on foot patrol across Afghanistan can use secure mobile handheld
devices and infantry-tailored apps to access digital maps, set up and share
routes, execute sudden mission changes and store critical information for use
back inside the wire.
The capability, established step by exacting step over three
years by experts at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and with
feedback from soldiers themselves, is the work of a program called
Transformative Applications.
TransApps made possible the connection to a network over
secure military radios of these hardened Android smartphones or tablets. A set
of mission-planning tools can overlay user-defined data directly onto
high-resolution digital maps already on the Android devices.
Dismounted patrols and company intelligence support teams
are key users of the devices, which include custom-modified Android operating
systems and Linux kernels, as well as security-stack-supporting data-at-rest
protection, data-in-transit protection, authentication, and app vetting and
control, DARPA officials said.
The TransApps program seeks to develop a library of secure
military applications that are as easy to use as commercial smartphone apps and
that troops can access on their military mobile devices. The program also wants
to establish a business model for the apps that bypasses bureaucratic delays in
acquiring and fielding new technology.
Doran Michels, DARPA’s TransApps program manager, briefed
reporters about the program during a Dec. 3 teleconference. A major DARPA
effort in the program began in 2010, when smartphones were proliferating in the
commercial sector, he said.
The agency wanted to “see if it would be feasible to
leverage these commercial products to address the enduring situational
awareness capability gap” between higher military echelons, he said, who during
wars had increasingly impressive intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance
capabilities inside the wire while ground troops outside the wire had few tools
for sharing information or understanding their battlefield environment.
As a hardware platform, DARPA chose Android devices, which
operate on an open system they could modify for their needs, Michels said.
“The first thing we needed to do to modify the devices was
to address strict security requirements that are inherent to taking mission
content to the battlefield, … and many of the approved mechanisms for securing
mobile devices don't apply in a battlefield environment,” he added.
The practice of mobile device management assumes the network
always will be available and the devices always will be on the network, Michels
said, so the devices can be actively managed for security. “But in a tactical
environment, soldiers are routinely without comms or they're in a patchy comms
environment,” he added, “so we needed security to be resident on the devices.”
Also in that environment, he explained, high-resolution
digital maps can’t be downloaded in real time, so they must be resident and
already configured on the handheld devices.
When soldiers do connect to a network, Michels said, it's
not over commercial wifi or cellular. “It's over secure military radios,” he
explained, “so we had to make sure that we could adapt to those waveforms and
also constrain our data throughput appropriately.”
Most importantly, the program had to respond to soldier
requirements, he said. “We wanted soldiers to drive the development of the
applications so we knew the apps could evolve in real time with dynamic mission
requirements,” Michels said.
In 2011, the TransApps team began working with an infantry
company, making apps based on their requirements. Initially, the soldiers
wanted apps focused on high-resolution map imagery in the palms of their hands,
Michels said, with interactive features that could help them navigate or follow
their mission plans or track environmental elements.
“Once we had done that, the next thing they wanted was to be
able to interact with the maps in a more complex way,” the program manager
said. “We saw that the handhelds made great collection platforms during their
mission, and … they wanted to be able to recompile critical elements of the
mission and get those back into the system so other people could benefit.”
Over a period of months, the team created apps tailored for
infantry soldiers. Once they had a suite of apps in fairly high demand, they
scaled up quickly, Michels said, growing from enough apps for a company to
enough for a battalion to enough for a brigade, and then enough for all
brigades in Afghanistan.
Over 18 months, the program went from zero to 3,000 users,
he added, supporting the entire Army in Afghanistan.
“While we were scaling, we weren’t just propagating out the
capability that we’d established,” the program manager said. “We were actually
improving it in real time as we went, so it was growing and getting better.”
The suite now includes more than 50 applications and is
growing, Michels said, adding that the team recently created an app in
partnership with the National Park Service called SMART Triage. The app lets
unit-level medics or first responders quickly document first aid for injured
personnel, especially in a mass-casualty catastrophe, to effectively and
accurately log injuries and treatments.
SMART Triage uses a 3-D mannequin that can be manipulated
and marked up with injuries and annotated with things such as medications
given, he said.
Another app, called TransHeat, has custom algorithms built
in just for soldiers. The algorithms passively process travel routes and let
the soldiers know by turning the routes different colors how often they’ve used
each route, Michels explained. The app can help the soldiers take different
routes and avoid becoming victims of roadside bombers or ambushes.
“Imagine having access to a developer who supported your
organization and you could say, ‘Would you consider making a feature that can
give me this output?’ And we try to be very responsive to that for soldiers. We
understand that change is kind of a permanent element in their environment,”
the program manager said.
Even for DARPA, populating what Michels calls the “very new
landscape” of tactical mobile with processes and standards for
battlefield-ready security mechanisms, exchanging high-resolution digital
imagery and many other leading-edge elements can be a solitary undertaking.
“A lot of people tend to think that security for mobile is a
given. We look at corollaries in enterprise [computing] where … we've got
mobile device management,” Michels said, adding that there were no maps for
creating offline security for the handheld devices TransApps worked with.
“We had to develop a multitier solution that was very
robust, … and it's actually a very popular solution now that has been adopted
by a number of other organizations within DOD and the federal government,” he
said.
Mobile device management, as it is known today and used in
enterprise computing for the kind of mobile devices used by the Defense
Department’s workforce, for example, is not possible in a tactical environment,
the program manager added. In the tactical model, he said, “networks, if they
exist, may be unreliable or controlled by the adversary. Networking over
military radios requires special adaptation, and many users' handheld devices
are often offline for weeks despite constant use in a standalone mode,” Michels
said.
“The enterprise device's security comes from the network,
but the security of the tactical device must reside within [the device]
organically,” he added. “The two paradigms can't converge until a secure,
reliable wireless network exists for tactical environments.”
The TransApps team had to create its own process and promote
a governmentwide standard to support the capability it needs on the handheld
devices for high-resolution digital imagery, which for tactical mobile can’t be
pushed over a network, as is done in the consumer world, Michels said.
On one side of the problem are many high-resolution imagery
products that are current and critically needed, he explained. On the other
side is the operational community that relies on such products for survival and
mission effectiveness.
In between is a chasm where the imagery products, collected
by different platforms, have no fluid mechanisms by which to migrate quickly
from the producers to the user community, he said.
During a recent meeting called the Mobile Imagery Technical
Exchange, community members and stakeholders discussed this and other
challenges related to sharing imagery. Attendees included representatives from
DARPA, the Army Geospatial Center, the Naval Research Laboratory, the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and others, Michels said.
“We have a number of excellent relationships now with
organizations like the AGC, NGA and NRL,” he added, “and we would not have been
successful without these thriving partnerships.”
Today, Michels said, DARPA’s focus is on transition.
“DARPA wants meaningful capabilities to be the yield here,”
he added. “All the services are pursuing tactical mobile capabilities. So we
spend a lot of time working with those partners and within their organizational
and funding constraints to figure out how they can leverage what DARPA has
achieved.”
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