At first glance, the Brightwood neighborhood in this central New England city would seem to have little in common with war-torn villages in Iraq or Afghanistan. But when two Massachusetts state troopers, Michael Cutone and Thomas Sarrouf, returned to their jobs here after deployments with a Green Beret unit in Iraq, they noticed troubling parallels. [...]

When improvised explosive devices (IEDs) talk, they have a lot to say. Each wire and detonator helps tell a story of who created the device. Their locations across a battlespace help create a visual map of IED networks. And now, two students in the Naval Postgraduate School’s defense analysis department are proving that efficiently recording [...]

Just as you would not expect a sniper to engage the enemy while blindfolded, we should not expect forces fighting improvised explosive device forces to attack bomb-building networks in the blind. Yet this is essentially what we have been doing, despite our best efforts to illuminate those networks through human and signals intelligence. These methods [...]

A routine midday police patrol through the crime-ridden North End of Springfield, Massachusetts, is interrupted when state troopers spot a teenager riding an unregistered motorcycle with no helmet. Instead of arresting the underage rider, who initially tries to flee, the police speak to him and his father, who is in the crowd that has gathered [...]

More than 30 Marines and sailors participated in a Marine civil information management training class and working group here Nov. 7-9. The training included hands-on practice with smartphones and tablets loaded with MarCIM, military software on a smartphone or tablet used to collect civil and humanitarian information. The training also included Q-and-As and suggestions for improvements. [...]

Marine Corps Capt. Carrick Longley briefed General James F. Amos, recently confirmed Marine Corps Commandant, on the field data collection smart phone application known as Field Information Support Tool (FIST), Sept. 24. “There was an interest in demonstrating to Gen. Amos one of the many research projects that Marines are doing at NPS,” said Longley. [...]

When an earthquake and tsunami ravaged Japan in 2011, civil affairs Marines expedited aid delivery with a powerful new tool — hand-held smart devices. It was a trial by fire for the experimental devices, used during yearlong software and hardware testing, which wrapped up in December. There are still two more year-long phases of testing before the [...]

Thanks to a faculty-student team at the Naval Postgraduate School, smart phones will play an even greater role in field-based data collection for a variety of missions, from humanitarian assistance and disaster response (HA/DR) to counterinsurgency operations. The prototype of a new smart phone application, called Field Information Support Tool (FIST) Light, was developed by [...]