A 5-ounce weapon of war, the
device is being used by the military in many ways, from
helping downed pilots to looking up Arabic phrases.
By Terril Yue Jones
Times Staff Writer
May 21 2003
As personal technologies go, the Palm Pilot personal digital
assistant has managed to become both an essential tool and
a cultural symbol. The hand-held computer, born in Silicon
Valley, is barely bigger than a cassette tape but keeps
track of the schedules and address books of millions of
the techno-masses. California's official Web site (www.ca.gov)
has a banner illustration across the top of the page with
images of Golden State natives: Napa Valley grapes, San
Francisco's cable car, the Hollywood sign — and a
Palm Pilot.
With recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. military
is discovering the benefits of hand-held computing, whether
on board ship, during training or on the battlefield.
While technology has traditionally flowed from the military-industrial
complex to the civilian world, the military is latching
onto the devices, which were pioneered by Milpitas, Calif.-based
Palm Inc. More than 21 million Palm hand-helds have been
sold, along with some 7 million more made by Sony Corp.,
Handspring Inc. and Hand- Era Inc.
While civilians use Palms to e-mail, play games and keep
track of schedules, soldiers have used Palms to determine
if mass casualties have been inflicted by chemical or biological
weapons. Navy SEAL commandos can use the devices to learn
high and low tides around the world to help plan assaults.
Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have used them to look up
helpful Arabic and Pashto phrases, such as, "Where
is there water?" or "Put your hands over your
head."
The PDAs, as they are known, can hold an encyclopedia's
worth of information in a sleek package weighing only 5
or 6 ounces. At times they can be more valuable to soldiers
than a machine gun or a gas mask.
Take the "Afghanistan evasion map," which is
designed to help downed pilots or escaped prisoners of war
get out from behind enemy lines.
"It's for when someone's hunting you," says Chris
Michel, chief executive of Military Advantage Inc., which
sells the map and dozens of other Palm programs, including
a guide to Morse code and a primer on martial arts. "You
need to find landmarks, you need to get out. At a time like
that, your Palm Pilot is your digital Swiss army knife."
There's no way to know how many PDAs are currently in use
by service members, since the Pentagon doesn't centralize
purchases. But individual military units and commands have
ordered tens of thousands of them, and service members buy
tens of thousands more on their own.
In a sign of the PDAs' increasing importance, cadets at
the U.S. Military Academy at West Point are issued Palms
upon entering as freshmen. The Navy bestows them on students
at its Officer Candidate School and at the U.S. Naval Academy
and when they graduate.
The hand-helds can replace overstuffed clipboards and volumes
of manuals, military tactics and paperwork, compacting them
into small units that don't get smudged or scattered by
the wind. Their size makes them ideal for taking notes while
crawling through tight compartments in the bowels of a ship.
And at prices as low as $99 for the entry-level Palm Zire,
they're affordable.
The military was eager to take advantage of PDAs and started
developing its own applications for Palm devices about five
years ago, according to John Inkley, Palm's federal sales
manager. Several private companies — many of them
founded by veterans — followed suit. Palm flew some
of its software developers to Washington to meet with potential
customers. In a series of meetings with Navy officers and
engineers, they brainstormed ways that PDAs could replace
paper and equipment. "It was mutual development with
new technology," Inkley says. .
Today, the military uses Palms for an array of tasks that
help it prepare for and conduct warfare.
A program based on the Army Combat Guide gives troops a
quick reference as they carry out various types of assaults,
ranging from an attack inside an urban building to an ambush
in the desert. "It's not a situation where you'll have
time to whip out a big textbook in the middle of battle
to see, 'What do we do next?' " says Oke Johnson, a
former Army tank officer whose Boulder, Colo., company,
Warrior Solutions Inc., sells the program for $120.
Aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which launched hundreds
of sorties against Iraq, specialists known as Landing Signals
Officers use Palms to grade pilot landings.
The Palms save about 90 minutes of paperwork a day and
are far more convenient than hauling a notebook around the
wind-whipped landing deck, says Lt. Rocky "Knute"
Baker, an LSO and S-3 Viking pilot.
Once a battle is over, a program from Arsoft helps soldiers
determine whether the dead and wounded were victims of nuclear,
biological or chemical weapons. The program lets soldiers
click through a checklist of pulse, breathing rate, skin
color, presence of spasms, blisters or burns, eye conditions
and even odors to determine the nature of the attack.
One U.S. lieutenant credited a program on his PDA called
MineFinder with helping him save an Afghani child who had
stepped on, but not detonated, a land mine during last year's
fighting against the Taliban. Tony Bussing, a corporal in
a medical company in the Indiana Army National Guard's 38th
Infantry Division, relies on his Sony Clie as a quick reference
for CPR protocols and for identifying anomalous heartbeats.
But the most useful piece of software on the battlefield,
he says, is ePocrates, which lists prescription drugs and
their uses, along with their generic names and compatibility
with other medications.
Bussing's Clie has a built-in camera and voice recorder,
which he puts to use when he arrives at the scene of an
accident in his civilian job as an emergency room medical
technician. "One of the first questions a doctor asks
is what kind of damage was done to the vehicle," Bussing
says. "With this hand-held, you just go around and
snap pictures of the accident scene and do a voice recording
of the treatment you gave."
The portability of this kind of technology has fundamentally
changed the nature of warfare, says Marwan Jamal, a professor
of information resources management at National Defense
University in Washington, D.C. By allowing military forces
greater mobility and more tactical information, PDAs bestow
a crucial competitive edge.
"If you know more than your enemy, you have an advantage,
" Jamal says. But not everyone in uniform is sold on
equipping military personnel with Palms.
Like other high-tech gadgets, PDAs are prone to glitches
that can be difficult for users to diagnose and repair.
Battery life is a worry when supply lines are stretched.
Soldiers could find themselves stuck if the data they depend
on suddenly becomes inaccessible. They are far more delicate
than other gear that goes into battle, but it's not worth
spending 10 times as much to make them hardier, Inkley says.
One Air Force officer who asked not to be identified says
members of his unit have reservations about giving them
to pilots. "If they're shot down and their Palm remains
on the aircraft, it means someone could pick it up and use
it against us."
Palm executives say there are ways to protect data. Sensitive
information, for instance, could be deleted automatically
if the password that protects it is entered incorrectly,
or it can be set to expire after a certain period of time.
Such hazards are outweighed by the benefits of using PDAs,
says Mark Margevicius, a military technology analyst with
Gartner Dataquest.
"Is the risk there? Absolutely," Margevicius
says. "Is it a detriment? I don't think so, or they
wouldn't be using them."
*
--------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writer Carol J. Williams, aboard the Abraham
Lincoln, contributed to this report.
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