Air Force needs to increase smart phone, application use

At the moment, the Air Force has at most 50 smart phones, but its chief information officer believes increasing that number and adding applications will help transition the service to a more effective force.

Lt. Gen. William Lord said in a media briefing at the Pentagon on Tuesday he wants to put smart phones in the hands of forward-deployed airmen to help them perform their jobs more efficiently. For example, a supply officer in a unit running low on munitions now must log on to an acquisition website from a computer to order more bombs, whereas "we need that application to be in the hand of the young man or woman standing in the [bomb storage area]" of some remote battlefield, Lord said.

"To push those rich experiences to mobile devices at the edge . . . [is] easy to say and hard to do," he said.

Lord also pointed to smart phone applications and said the Air Force "ought to be copying" the Army's use of open source apps.

The Army currently is field-testing smart phones in a tactical environment at Fort Bliss, Texas, and White Sands Missile Range, N.M., and is developing secure mobile applications for use on the battlefield through a project known as Apps for the Army. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, vice chief of staff, told Nextgov last week that he envisions a not-so-distant future where the Army issues every troop a handheld gadget to do anything from sending e-mail to controlling robots on the battlefield.

The purpose of the Apps for Army project, a competition launched in March for soldiers and Army civilians to develop new applications for handheld devices, was "to encourage smarter, better and faster technical solutions to meet operational needs," Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, the service's chief information officer said at the time. The Army distributed $30,000 in prizes to winners.

Lord said he has tasked a general officer in his organization to develop a similar program for the Air Force. "I'm interested in the process, how did they do that," he said.

Lord, who carriers a government-issued BlackBerry and a personal iPhone, said the service has 30,000 to 40,000 BlackBerry devices on the network and should expand its use of security-enabled BlackBerrys. Nearly half of them now have some form of remote access to the Air Force's secure network, he said.

The Air Force is good at deploying yesterday's technology today, he said. "I want to deploy tomorrow's technology today."