Tech-warriors changing the face of the Army.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M.--Anyone who has lost faith in the Army's procurement system, look no further than Private First Class Nicholas Johnson.

A commander's driver by day and computer programmer by night, Johnson spent four weeks at a simulated combat outpost in the desert this summer creating software applications that allow unit leaders to track troops' whereabouts, identify potential enemies and pinpoint geographic coordinates of intended targets. These apps, unlike traditional military software, are open-source and compatible with most commercial smartphones or tablet computers.

In what may be a shock to some procurement officials and military contractors, Johnson was able to design these apps within a matter of hours, at minimal cost to the U.S. government.

To be sure, Johnson is not your average private. He was a network administrator in his previous life, and has an extraordinary ability to grasp soldiers' needs and turn them into digital products. After an all-nighter writing code, Johnson will hand phones back to soldiers and say, "By the way, this requirement you had last week, it's done," he tells National Defense in a interview at White Sands, where Johnson's unit--Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 35th Armored Regiment--was participating in a network-integration exercise involving an entire brigade of 3,200 soldiers. The 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, based at Fort Bliss, Texas, has become the Army's goto organization for testing new technology.

Johnson's apps are being evaluated for possible Army-wide use, as part of a program called "connecting soldiers to digital applications," or CSDA. On a large TV-size computer monitor at Alpha Company's operations center, Johnson's software displays a map of the unit's area of operations. By touching the screen, he could show different pieces of information, or "battlefield metrics" that are piped in from sensors such as streaming video from drones. Icons depicted soldiers' individual location and biometrics.

Unlike most Army units that manage data in separate "stove pipes," Johnson stores it in a central server, and is able to design individual apps based on what commanders or team leaders request. The server is the "company cloud," he explains. It's no different than the cloud-based computing that has become standard in the private sector.

"This is the foundation of bringing together everything that is measurable on the battlefield," he says.

The problem with many...