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The U.S. Army is teaming with the nation's top-level digital security agencies to establish a secure wireless network for troops equipped with smartphones on the battlefield.
The National Security Agency's commercial products division contacted Michael McCarthy, director of operations for the Army's Brigade Modernization Command's Mission Command, to ask how it could help.
"You could have knocked me over with a feather," McCarthy said as he briefed attendees.
Information assurance remains the greatest challenge in the Army's initiative to equip large number of troops with the phones.
The answer doesn't necessarily lie in the handsets themselves, McCarthy cautioned, but rather in the infrastructure and network the Army establishes to support the phones.
The Army is testing a host of different infrastructure solutions, both traditional networks and those that use a radio and frequency-hopping infrastructure to protect information sent to the phones.
McCarthy said he's especially interested in the frequency-hopping network built by xG Technology, based in Sarasota, Fla. During a test, a military jammer shut down all of the Army's communications systems except for the xG network, he said.
Soldiers and engineers will test the xG network as well as other network systems at the Network Integration Evaluation (NIE) at Fort Bliss, Texas, and at White Sands Missile Range, N.M., in 2012. The NIE has been valuable tool in getting smartphones in soldiers' hands in simulated combat exercises, McCarthy said.
"We've been able to get immediate feedback from these soldiers at what works and what doesn't," he said.
