A Marine officer uses a commercial tablet in an experimental exercise.

The Marine Corps and National Security Agency have joined forces to bring cellphones to the battlefield by 2019. Working with the NSA’s new Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) program should let the Marines acquire cutting-edge civilian technology swiftly without sacrificing security, said Maj. Kevin Shepherd of Marine Corps Systems Command.

The Marine Corps hasn’t chosen a vendor yet. The Army’s comparable Nett Warrior program and some intriguing Marine experiments have gone with Android, but Army Special Operations Command just dumped its Androids for iPhones, so there’s a precedent for either choice.

To help them choose, the Marines put out a preliminary Request For Information (RFI) in January, asking for industry input. They’re now drafting a refined RFI that should be out “very shortly,” said Maj. Shepherd, a helicopter pilot who now heads the Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) Common Handheld team, which stood up last fall. “That will clarify the stuff that we’ve learned since January,” he told me. “We learn very quickly in this field because it changes very rapidly.”

The competition will kick off with a formal Request For Proposals (RFP) this fall — perhaps even before fiscal 2017 begins on October 1st — with an eye to getting fielded systems in the hands of young squad leaders in 2019.

The Army Nett Warrior system uses Android.

Security Vs. Speed

Historically, the military has faced two big barriers to acquiring civilian information technology: bureaucracy and security. Paperwork-heavy, multi-year procurements turn off civilian IT firms used to rolling out new product every few months. High security standards require painstaking certification of new technology — a process so prolonged that by the time the government says a product is safe to use, it often is dangerously obsolete.

NSA’s Commercial Solutions for Classified aims to shortcut the approval process, cutting it from years to months or weeks. Vendors get their products certified by the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP), a public-private partnership, and meet a number of other commercial and federal standards. Overall, CSfC is less rigid than the norm for government programs, according to a report by the Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT). Once a technology jumps these hurdles, it goes on NSA’s approved list for use by the military.

Central to CSfC’s security approach is the concept of “layered defense.” In essence, each component needs to be secure in its own right, able to stand alone rather than relying on some other part of the overall system to protect it. That way, if one part of the system fails, the rest is still secure. Instead of a single overarching security structure protecting the individual components, it’s the defenses of the individual components that — in the aggregate — protect the overall system.

Security is crucial because of what’s going to be on those phones. The chosen device will have to run the Joint Battle Command Platform (JBC-P), the latest evolution of the famous Blue Force Tracker (BFT). Such software lets troops see their own location on a Garmin-style map, the location of friendly forces — automatically updated over the network — and of potential threats — as reported by other units. Leaders can mark objectives electronically with digital “chem lights” and share intelligence information.

The Army already has such software on Android devices in some soldiers’ hands, fielded through its Nett Warrior program. (The second “t” is deliberate: It’s the last name of a World War II hero). The Marines don’t, not outside of small-scale experiments. “The Marine Corps does not currently have dismount computing capability,” said Maj. Shepherd. (“Dismount” refers to foot troops, as opposed to those mounted in vehicles). “There’s nobody with a fielded cellphone or tablet out in the field using it.”

The Marines can’t simply adopt the Army system because they’re a different service with different needs, Shepherd told me. “I have some issues they do not have, such as integration with Navy ships and naval aviation,” he said. The Army works mostly with its own helicopters and the Air Force. The Marines have to work intimately with the Navy, both surface ships and aircraft, and have systems that can operate both afloat and ashore. Connecting the Navy and Marines has only gotten harder after a 15 years of land war, when the Marines not only spent most of their time inland but got lots of urgent upgrades that the Navy did not.