Could the smart phone be standard issue for every soldier?

Specialists at the Army's technology integration center at Fort Bliss, Texas, envision a day when its soldiers will carry a very essential piece of equipment along with their military-issued weapons: a smart phone.

The Army already has a large pool of young soldiers who view smart phones and their myriad applications as a routine part of their off-duty lives, said Col. Marisa Tanner, chief of the mission command capability division of the Future Force Integration Directorate.

So, it makes sense for the Army to tap into "what soldiers do every day, and leverage those skills" for use on the battlefield, said Mike McCarthy, a senior Army civilian who is director of the mission command complex for the integration center.

Tanner and McCarthy said they plan to introduce the smart phone on a small scale early next year when they kick off a project called Connecting Soldiers to Digital Applications. They will test their theory at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, which abuts Fort Bliss.

Officials at the integration center have decided to let young troops lead the way in smart phone use, Tanner said. The center has issued 10 smart phones to a core of soldiers to "just let them fool around" and come up with ideas for how it can be used in the field.

Tanner said the center works closely with Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, the Army chief information officer, and plans to test some of the applications developed for his Apps for the Army contest, which attracted entries from 141 soldiers or Army civilians. Winners will be announced in August.

McCarthy said the integration center plans to give smart phones to 192 soldiers assigned to a company within the 5th Brigade Combat Team of the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss. The division serves as the Army Evaluation Task Force, which will carry out the first phase of a tactical test.

Most of the phones will run on the Android operating system Google developed, along with a couple of Apple iPhones, McCarthy said. After the initial test, the group will field 1,200 smart phones to the entire brigade in the fall for a large-scale experiment.

McCarthy said smart phones provide soldiers with easy and instant access to knowledge and information they need on the battlefield. Tanner said the devices provide every soldier with connectivity on the battlefield, not only infantry squad leaders.

Even without applications, she said equipping every soldier with a smart phone marks a leap in situational awareness, because the mobile devices come equipped with a GPS receiver to pinpoint locations and a camera to take pictures of the terrain and local population where the soldiers are deployed.

Tactical applications the integration center plans to test include a map-based app that contains situational information about an operational area and its population, including, for example, locating on a digital map all the improvised bomb attacks that occurred in the last 48 hours, Tanner said.

Another application pulls free text reports and data about an area, and then sorts and organizes the information for a squad leader. The application is designed with an eye for operations in Afghanistan and will allow soldiers to call up photos and intelligence on tribal leaders, Tanner said. She said the integration center also is developing an application to manage helicopter medevacs.

The integration center will use wireless service from Sprint for the White Sands tests because the carrier has good coverage in that area. Tanner and McCarthy conceded that the real challenge for the smart phone-equipped Army is the lack of cell phone coverage in many areas of the world. But the Army could work around the problem by setting up its own mobile cell towers or tapping into WiFi networks connected to tactical networks.

Today's smart phones also do not meet a Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2, which governs wireless security, but McCarthy said he expects some to qualify soon.

Tanner and McCarthy said their vision for an Army working off smart phones might be a stretch today, but the tests could move that vision closer to reality.