February 23, 2008
iPods in the Battle Zone...
This is pretty neat. iPods carried by our troops to use as phrase-books, and repositories of all the information they need for a mission....
...The creator of the VCommunicator software -- Orlando-based Vcom3D -- originally designed it to teach soldiers basic Iraqi Arabic phrases. However, now troops are finding new tactical applications for the device, said Ernie Bright, product manager at Vcom3D.
Troops also are uploading maps and other images and content onto the video iPods to assist them at vehide checkpoints and door-to-door searches, said Bright.
If soldiers are looking for a particular individual, they can load a photo of their target and correlate it to Arabic script that asks, "Do you recognize this person?"
Troops also can store sound clips and other pertinent information that they need to conduct mission briefs for small units, said Bright.
The most recent version of the Vcommunicator comes on the new iPod nano, which troops are strapping to their wrists or wearing on lanyards around their necks.
The nano units are much faster, much smaller and more user-friendly, said Youmans. "That's one of the benefits of using commercial off-the-shelf -- the technology advances really quickly," he told National Defense in a phone interview.
The nano variants were completed in time for the 4th Brigade's deployment last fall, he said.
The devices also come in languages that are suitable for operations in Afghanistan. In October, during a training exercise at Fort Polk, La., soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division tested iPod nanos programmed with the Dari and Pashto languages. Youmans said he expects the unit will request the devices for future deployments....
That off-the-shelf technology thing is very true. Can you imagine the Army ordering the creation of a Mil Spec equivalent? Spending a billion dollars developing something the size of a brick, and available by 2014? They could call it the Aquila-Pod!
That's one of the good things about an actual shooting war; it concentrates the mind. People solve problems—they just ruthlessly go ahead and solve them, without bureaucratic politeness. Which is another reason why the people who claimed that actually fighting a Global War on Terror would fray and frazzle and just wear out and spoil our shiny perfect military all have brown eyes—because they are full of shit up to their eyebrows.
Posted by John Weidner at February 23, 2008 07:47 AMYeah, it's amazing how fast electronics changes these days, and it's not just computers as computers, but how *cheap* computation changes things.
I think I mentioned somewhere along the way that I'm an amateur (or "ham") radio operator. I've picked up an interest in antique electronic test equipment (signal generators, component testers, oscilloscopes, etc.), principally the stuff made by General Radio prior to about 1960. If Hewlett-Packard (now Agilent) is the Cadillac of test equipment, GR was Packard-- a now-defunct maker of really good items.
Don't get me wrong-- HP stuff works, and works well. But GR built their stuff to last and last and last. I have a GR capacitance bridge that was probably made during WWII, and it still works perfectly, and will probably still be working come the next Ice Age. It no doubt took several hundred man-hours to design, tens of man-hours to assemble, and is chock-full of components that themselves represent equal levels of skull-sweat and labor to produce. But it's almost laughably crude by modern standards, and hideously expensive. (They cost about $300 in 1945 money, or about $2500 in today's dollars. Now, you'd be lucky to get $10 for it at a hamfest. Sic transit gloria General Radio.......)
Here in 2008, you can get a gizmo that does the same thing, with equal precision, for probably $19.95 from Radio Shack. Thanks to modern electronics, from computer-aided design to microprocessors embedded in the device itself, the modern gizmo takes less skull-sweat to design, less labor and material to build, and if it breaks, so what? You throw it in the trash and get a new one.
(Tries to picture being a dollar-an-hour technician in 1945, and having to tell the boss that I just broke his $300 capacitance bridge. *ulp*)
A lot of this change has happened in maybe the last 20 years or so-- the GR way (in more economical form) was the way test equipment was made up until the late '80s. Microprocessors have changed things immensely, and it ain't getting any slower. The iPod is just one aspect of it. The same effect is at work elsewhere-- the hideously expensive Aquila you cite, John, is now a cheaper reality thanks to this revolution, and even more changes are in the pipeline.
This also has the benefit of speeding useful stuph to the front lines. I think I've already written here about why Uncle Sam's toilet seats cost $600, so I won't repeat myself. But I do want to note that much of the reason the equipment was made to "mil-spec" was because a lot of the consumer-grade stuff was too unreliable (and expensive, compared to its reliability) for Uncle Sam's purposes. Now, thanks to modern manufacturing and the embedding of cheap computers in consumer-grade electronics, there's no point in "mil-spec" stuff. Consumer-grade is effectively mil-spec, and it's cheap, cheap enough to throw away and get another one from the supply-sergeant's "back pocket". And the eye-poppingly low prices (remember what color TVs cost circa 1975?) make possible an equally mind-boggling array of special-purpose devices. No more having to lash together specially-adjusted general-purpose devices to achieve your purpose-- now you can get just what you need off-the-shelf. No need for expensive design and testing; just walk into Best Buy, and there it is.
Wow.
Posted by: Hale Adams at February 23, 2008 06:16 PMfrom the article you linked to:
At the time, the U.S. Army already had its own experimental UAV program, called "Aquila." However, a very different scenario was unfolding at project headquarters in Ft. Sill, Oklahoma. While the Israeli drones used over the Bekka Valley had been developed in a year and cost about $50,000 each, the Aquila's initial estimated cost was $560,000 -- 10 times as high. And the Aquila's price eventually grew to over $3 million a plane.
You know, it occurs to me, the Predator probably costs about the same as the "failure" Aquila did, once you adjust for inflation. Maybe more, I am not sure what year dollars they're talking about.
And everyone thinks the Predator is a success.
Maybe they were just trying to push the technology too hard? Maybe we wouldn't _have_ a Predator if it weren't for the money "wasted" on the Aquila?
Posted by: Phil Fraering at February 25, 2008 05:36 PMI think the difference is that the Predator started out as a fairly simple design, by an Israeli engineer. It was put into operation by the CIA, and only subsequently, and incrementally, were improvements added. The Aquila tried to do everything ab initio.
I don't think the Predator is any cheaper. But it has evolved with our needs, and in response to lots of real use.
