Pentagon struggles to integrate smartphones, create mobile workforce.

• Author: Parsons, Dan
• Position: Mobile Technology

The Defense Department in 2005 took up development of a smartphone that could access both classified and unclassified networks anywhere in the world.

The resultant Sectera Edge, made by General Dynamics, would have revolutionized the way military personnel--clown to individual troops--access and share information.

Instead, Pentagon officials got a lesson in what happens when their sluggish acquisition practices go up against the commercial market's swift innovation.

"It would have been a phenomenal device had the iPhone not been introduced before it," said Debora Plunkett, information assurance director at the National Security Agency. "It had been overtaken by technology by the time it was actually delivered. The government can no longer develop and build products in time to make a difference.

Plunkett is among other officials who are seeking to make the Defense Department's workforce more mobile.

The Sectera, which took five years and millions of dollars to develop, has become an oft-mentioned example of the commercial market's consistent ability to outpace government research-and-development programs. At more than $3,000 a copy, the outsized Blackberry-like device with a physical keyboard and external antenna was overshadowed by Apple's sleek, $300 iPhone and other increasingly capable and less expensive commercial devices it inspired.

By 2012, half of all U.S. mobile consumers owned smartphones, with that figure projected to grow to 70 percent by 2013, according to a recent Nielsen survey. The trend toward mobile computing and a reliance on real-time data has been no less dramatic within the military, said Robert Carey, the Defense Department's principal deputy chief information officer.

"The only thing not influenced by information are dumb bullets coming out of handguns and rifles," he said at a July 20 Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association symposium on mobile devices in Washington, D.C. "You're seeing a growing trend ... of us not being chained to our desks. I don't care where our people are, I care that they're doing work."

For that to be a reality within the Defense Department, "the dismounted soldier or Marine in Afghanistan has to have the same kinds of connectivity" as someone working stateside, Carey said.

The explosion of commercial mobile devices occurred so quickly in fact that the Defense Department and other national security agencies are scrambling to adjust network infrastructure and security policies...