Smartphones-for-soldiers campaign hits wall as army experiences growing pains.

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

"A smartphone for every soldier" may be a clever slogan. But trying to turn it into reality is becoming an uphill battle for the U.S. Army.

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It's not that the Army doesn't have the money With a $10 billion a year information-technology budget, it buys loads of gizmos. But smartphones, although inexpensive compared to most devices soldiers use in combat, present unique challenges. The biggest one is that they give soldiers considerably more freedom to receive and send information than the Army is comfortable with.

Senior commanders fret about issues such as how to ensure no sensitive battlefield intelligence ends up on Facebook. Other vexing questions: How will phone apps be managed? What happens when phones are lost or stolen? And will these fragile objects even survive the rigors of combat?

Another headache is the communications infrastructure. Cellular towers don't exist everywhere the U.S. military goes. The Army will have to bring its own, which creates a new set of technology hurdles and additional expense.

"We have some issues to work through," says Maj. Gen. Steven Smith, deputy chief information officer and head of Army cybersecurity.

A flurry of headlines over the past year about the Army's newfound love for iPhones and Androids may have generated favorable PR for the service, but it also created the false impression that every soldier will be carrying an Army-issued smartphone. That may happen one day, but it could be a while.

"This is coming," Smith says. "We are trying to get in front of it."

The only "officially approved" smartphones for government business are Blackberries and other devices that use the Windows Mobile 6.1 operating system. They are issued selectively to officers or unit commanders, not to everyone.

The Army's Training and Doctrine Command recently purchased more than a thousand smartphones and other mobile tech--iPods, Kindles, iPads, Nooks--to evaluate, as part of a program that is called "Connecting Soldiers to Digital Apps." But officials stress that none of this implies that the Army is endorsing a particular product. The only certainty about the Army's smartphone strategy is that it will be hardware agnostic.

"With the technology changing as fast as it does, it does not make sense to limit us in any way," an Army spokeswoman says.

Of all the Army's concerns about smartphones, none is bigger than cybersecurity. "If we don't protect that data, it becomes open source," Smith says at an industry conference- Many senior officials also harbor a mistrust of smartphones because they allow users to work and play at the same time. "I don't want a guy with a mobile device attempting to bring fire against the enemy [indirect fire] and have him refresh his iTunes account,"...