These smartphones on soldiers' chests are becoming an important tool in the US Army's plans for a high-tech fight
The End User Devices are attached to soldiers' chests and run on batteries carried on their backs.
US Army photo by Sgt.
Nathan Arellano Tlaczani US Army soldiers are using smartphones mounted on their chests for mapping and communicating.
Soldiers found the End User Devices useful but ran into connection issues and said they still need physical backups.
Army leaders used a recent exercise to assess how many soldiers should have the devices.
The soldiers stood at the edge of a building, readying to push deeper into the city for the next phase of the fight.
Some checked their ammunition, while others mapped out their moves on the smartphones on their chests.
The US Army refers to the systems Business Insider saw used in this urban training scenario as End User Devices, Samsung phones that have been stripped, ruggedized, and reprogrammed for soldiers.
EUDs are home to new applications that Army leaders anticipate will improve battlefield awareness and speed up decision-making.
The devices reflect the Army's shift toward commercially available technology .
While they've been in use for years, they're getting updated with new functions as the Army continues its major digital transformation.
During a desert exercise, Project Convergence Capstone , at Fort Irwin in California last month, roughly 10,000 soldiers gathered to engage in simulated large-scale combat and test new technologies , including drones, electronic warfare systems, and the Army's prototype command-and-control system, known as Next Generation Command and Control.
Soldiers were using EUDs inside carriers attached to their chests and powered by large batteries in cases on their backs.
The smart devices were loaded with the Android Team Awareness Kit, or ATAK, application, which allowed users to access a real-time geospatial map that showed where they and their friendly forces were in the field and also rough locations of potential enemy forces.
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