ATAK / TAK

The US military's soldier-level mapping app — the Team Awareness Kit, on Android known as ATAK — turns a phone, tablet or laptop into a shared geospatial situational-awareness and command tool. Built by the Air Force Research Laboratory as a cheap commercial-off-the-shelf alternative to bespoke battle-management hardware, it now spans 250,000-plus users across the US military, allied forces and first responders, and ships in an open-source civilian version. It is the Western reference point that Ukraine's GIS Arta and Kropyva and Russia's Strelets all get measured against.

Overview

ATAK (Android Team Awareness Kit; the military build is the Android Tactical Assault Kit) is a smartphone geospatial-infrastructure and situational-awareness application, the flagship of the broader TAK family. It overlays a live map with friendly and enemy positions, lets users navigate by GPS, share data across a team, mark and pass targets, and even cue drones — rendering the picture in the NATO-standard APP-6 military symbology and exchanging it in the Cursor on Target (CoT) data format, per Wikipedia. Its defining feature is an open plugin architecture: capability is bolted on for specific missions — close air support, direct action, law enforcement, border security, disaster response, off-grid mesh communications. Where Ukraine's apps are war-grown and Russia's are state-built, ATAK is the long-running American answer to the same question — how to give the individual soldier a shared digital map — and it runs on cellular, satellite or MANET radio bearers.

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