SMART: Situational awareness experiments with the Norwegian home guard using Android

SMART – pervasive situational awareness at the individual soldier level – was a Concept Development and Experimentation (CD&E) project carried out during 2016. The concept being tested was the use of smart technology as a cheap and lowcomplexity platform for collaboration and situational awareness for the Norwegian home guard (HV). In conjunction with HV, we decided to focus on the HV area forces. Due to the large number of area forces, and the limited time these forces have available for training, a technical solution that aims to improve the situational awareness of the individual soldier within the HV area forces need to be simple and intuitive in use and have a low cost. This means that smart technology is of particular interest to this group of users. Furthermore, these forces primarily require exchanging unclassified information, but they need this information exchange to be as secure as possible. This lead to SMART targeting “trusted unclassified” communications, which meant that unclassified information should be exchanged with sufficient security for the users to trust using the platform to share their information. SMART includes initial discussions on the security aspects of utilizing smart technology as a platform. As there are no clear security guidelines for “trusted unclassified” communications, what we did was to define some reasonable requirements and discuss whether they could be met by the current solution in different contexts. Furthermore, we explored the idea of using external secure elements, also known as smart cards, to store securely sensitive information independently from the device status. SMART included building a demonstrator based on the Android platform. This demonstrator was tested iteratively by HV, first through several technical trials, and finally during an operational exercise. Before and after the exercise we used questionnaires to map the users’ expectations and experiences regarding the demonstrator, respectively. Summarized, the respondents both expected and experienced a more rapid and efficient execution of their missions using the SMART demonstrator. This mapping of expectations and experiences also revealed that the soldiers brought their own phones to the exercise and used them if there were issues with their primary communications channel. This shows that a better coordinated and controlled use of such resources in accordance with the “trusted unclassified” concept in SMART was both timely and relevant. The final experiment report from SMART was delivered to the HV at the end of 2016. In general, the results from the activity indicate that using civilian smart technology yields an operational value. The SMART demonstrator and concept can provide cheap and low-complexity “trusted unclassified” communications to the HV’s area forces and others who may need this capability.