Army's promise to war-bound soldiers: a wireless mobile network.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Army Technology - Company overview

If the Army's new tech-buying strategy goes according to plan, soldiers soon may be ditching paper maps, staticky radios and bulky satellite receivers.

Instead, they would receive ultra-light radios, tablet computers and sleek smartphones that would actually work in war zones.

For the Army, achieving such goals would be nothing short of a miracle. Although it spends $10 billion a year on network technology, troops in combat zones do not have easy access to information.

The problem often is described as a "digital divide" between the haves--the upper echelons of command--and the have-nots--the platoons and squads that are deployed in remote areas and cut off from the Army's main tactical networks.

At brigade and battalion-level headquarters, commanders can tap into loads of data--maps, satellite images, video feeds and reams of intelligence reports. That data is not available to the average soldier on the beat in a combat zone. Troops v\ho do the day-to-day patrolling by truck or on foot have push-to-talk frequency modulated (FM) radios, but no ability to pass around important battlefield intelligence such as digital images.

After more than a decade of failed attempts and billions spent to bring the Army into the information age, the service now has a plan that, by military procurement standards, is rather radical. It will focus on giving the latest wireless technology to war-bound units, instead of trying to acquire new equipment for the entire 1.2-million strong Army. It will seek to purchase commercially available items, even if they are not exactly what generals may want, so they can be acquired quickly and used by soldiers before they become outdated. And instead of letting the procurement bureaucracy decide what to buy, the Army will have a dedicated brigade of combat-seasoned "testers" who will say aye-or-nay to a proposed new gizmo.

"Right now, the network is the Army's number one modernization effort," said Lt. Gen. Susan S. Lawrence, the Army's recently sworn-in chief information officer.

"We want a network that can provide soldiers and civilians information of all categories and forms, as well as a means to collaborate in real-time, at the exact moment required, in any environment, under all circumstances," Lawrence said in an emailed statement.

The big hurdle standing in the way is the Army's acquisition system, which was designed to manage stand-alone widgets and weapons systems, not a seamless global network. It is estimated that there are currently 40 separate programs spread across the Army that would have to be integrated in order to create the desired network. The procurement process also is IT-unfriendly in that it is too slow to keep pace with advances in the commercial sector.

All that is about to change, said Col. (P) John Morrison, Army director of land-war-net battle command. Morrison is overseeing the new network modernization plan.

"Our programs were not aligned to deliver a network capability," he said at an Institute for Defense and Government Advancement conference in Arlington, Va.

To accomplish what the Army wants, he said, is "going to require a fundamental change in how the Army does business."

Morrison's boss, Army...