Army's Apple Shines in the Desert By Leander Kahney
The U.S. military is shipping a lot of hardware to the Middle East for the impending war on Iraq, but only one Mac.
In the entire theater of operations, involving nearly 300,000 troops and hundreds of tanks and aircraft, one lonely Macintosh shipped out, according to the major who took it there.
The Mac is a Titanium G4 PowerBook, and it belongs to Major Shawn Weed, an intelligence planner with the Third Infantry Division, which is preparing for action in the deserts of Kuwait.
"It is the only one out here in the desert," said Weed. "The problem with computers in the Army is they are bought by the gross and not necessarily purchased to accomplish certain functions. The Army doles out laptops in the same way we dole out boots, tents or any other class of supply."
According to Weed, he was issued the rugged Panasonic Toughbook, but it didn't work fast enough. Weed declined to specify what he does exactly, but said he works with giant satellite and reconnaissance images, presumably for battlefield planning. When he opened these giant image files on the Toughbook, it would slow to an excruciating crawl, he said.
"Frankly, lives are in the balance here, so the quicker I can get stuff done accurately, the better," Weed said. "The Mac makes this work simple, quick and efficient. The other laptops either can't open the files or lock up halfway through, losing whatever I was working on at the time, and then (I have) to restart the computer and start over."
Weed's PowerBook has a 1-GHz chip and runs Mac OS X. He had to write a special requisition order to get it, he said.
The Third Infantry Division is a mechanized unit, specializing in desert warfare. The division played a key role in the Gulf War, and has been rotating units through the region since then.
First Lieutenant David Chasteen, an officer in the U.S. Army's Chemical Corps, who first alerted Wired News to the Mac's presence in Kuwait, said Weed fought a "predictable uphill fight" to persuade the army to buy the PowerBook. Chasteen said the motto of the army's IT department is, "We fear change."
"He's got a Mac at home and knew it could do it better," said Chasteen. "They signed off on it only a month before we deployed, and while it isn't ruggedized like the Toughbooks, it has remained trouble-free, stable and solid as a rock." According to Chasteen, the only other Macs in the Third Infantry Division are back at the headquarters in Fort Stewart, Georgia. The Public Affairs Office uses a couple of dual-processor PowerMac G4s to publish the division's newsletter, he said.
Chasteen said he noticed Weed's PowerBook on a visit to the Third Infantry Divisions' operations center in the desert.
"In a room full of ugly, ruggedized Panasonic Toughbooks running Windows 2000," he said, "the glowing white Apple against the titanium skin of the G4's lid draws looks from everywhere, and acts as a magnet for the closet Mac addicts serving with the Third Infantry Division."
Macs may be few and far between in the armed forces, but there are plenty among the press corps, according to reports. Apple's machines are popular in the media, especially with the TV news crews, who use them to edit digital video footage.
Weed's claim that his Mac is the only one in the desert couldn't be verified. Numerous queries to four separate information officers based in Kuwait and Washington failed to elicit any information about the different kinds of computers the army uses.