Ten thousand soldiers, one lesson
In July, about 10,000 soldiers ran simulated large-scale combat at Fort Irwin for the Project Convergence Capstone. Many of them wore hardened commercial Android phones on their chests, with battery packs on their backs. The 25th Infantry Division alone fielded about 2,200 of these end user devices. Soldiers used them for a live map of friendly positions, enemy markers, photos, chat, and planning the next move.
They liked them. A company commander said the chat let his soldiers reach him directly. Another captain said the devices gave him real-time targeting feedback that had been critical. Then the network went away, sometimes from simulated electronic warfare and sometimes for no reason anyone could name.
What happened when the link dropped
Apps slowed. Maps loaded with less detail. A platoon sergeant said his device wasn't working properly without a connection. The same captain who praised the targeting feedback said the analog copy is what he fights and lives on, especially in degraded environments. Troops kept paper maps alongside the phones the whole exercise.
That is the right instinct, and it says more about the software than the soldiers. The phone has more compute and storage than the laptops that ran a battalion staff ten years ago. The problem is software that treats the network as the place where the data lives, so the device becomes a thin window that goes dark when the window closes.
Local-first is a design decision
The Army's own writers have been saying this for a while. A Warrant Officer Journal piece in March argued for moving from centralized cloud dependencies to distributed AI that keeps working in denied environments. The same logic applies to the map, the chat, and the plan.
EdgeLance stores the mission on the device. Map layers, tracks, the plan, messages, and the AI models the unit approved are all local, so losing the link costs freshness, not function. Changes sync device to device over the team's own mesh, hop by hop, and catch up with the wider network when it returns. A device that loses every peer still has the full mission and its own record of what it did while alone.
Keep the paper, fix the software
None of this argues against TAK, which these soldiers ran and which keeps improving on a published release schedule. It argues for what sits under and beside it. A tool that shows a great picture when connected and a blank one when jammed teaches soldiers to trust the paper map, which is what happened here.
Lt. Gen. Michael McCurry said the exercise was informing the Army about who needs these devices and how far down they should go. The answer will depend partly on what the devices can do with no network at all. Units should test that directly: pull the link on purpose, at the worst moment, and see what is left on the screen. We have been arguing since January that the network is already walking around in soldiers' pockets.