Smart phone apps at war
Your smart phone can do a lot of things: tell you the weather, play you some music, play video games. Or help you fight a war. There’s a boom going on right now in smart phone apps for the military. Apps that estimate bullet trajectory, apps that train you to run an anti-missile defense system, anything a soldier or officer might need, there’s, well, an app for that. Or at least there soon will be.
We hear from Luke Catania one of the winners of a recent contest held by the military for the development of apps to be used by the Army. We also talk to PW Singer, director of 21st Century Defense Initiative at Brookings, who says the efficiency, affordability, and easy distribution of apps makes them appealing to military brass. Singer also says that since many of the soldiers using the apps are 18 or 19 years old, they’ve grown up being somewhat native to the technology and it’s a lot easier to train them on a smart phone instead of a specially built piece of equipment.
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