DARPA, the US military’s research wing, has a problem on its hands: Satellites, unmanned drones (UAVs), and myriad other worldwide sensors are now so ubiquitous and omnipotent that the Department of Defense (DOD) doesn’t actually know how to make the best use of them. In other words, the hardware is there — oh boy is the hardware there! — but the software isn’t. To tackle this particularly tricky issue, DARPA is looking for smartphone app developers to help build “sophisticated, adaptive applications.”

Yes, DARPA wants to give smartphone developers access to the DOD’s fleet of Hellfire missile-equipped UAVs. Instead of using a single, remote pilot to fly just one UAV, DARPA imagines “an app […] that allows a swarm of small deployed UAVs to be controlled as a single unit (a hive [mind] so to speak).” The same app could be applied to DARPA’s BigDog robot mule, or in the future an army of ground-based, Cylon-like robot warriors.

It goes further than battalions of automatons, though: DARPA is also looking for app developers who can program novel solutions for organizing and sharing video surveillance, peer-to-peer transfers between sensors, and new, user-friendly interfaces for the computers that soldiers are required to use, both at HQ and on the battlefield. The press release explicitly mentions using smartphone-type sensors such as accelerometers, cameras, and gyroscopes for combat applications, too; an accelerometer could detect when a truck rolls over it, for example.

At the heart of this rather unprecedented outreach is ADAPT, DARPA’s new sensor system. Built on a common hardware and software platform, ADAPT is simply meant to speed up the DoD’s development cycle, and thus its reaction speed in times of war or conflict. The current route, which just about every government in the world uses, relies on proprietary, custom-built, non-interoperable solutions that take up to eight years to develop. Smartphone developers have shown the ability to develop groundbreaking apps in days or weeks, and our militaristic overlords would very much like a slice of that pie.

The end goal, incidentally, is a military app store, where a soldier or officer — equipped with a standard-issue DOD tablet or smartphone — can hit up the Warfighter Market and download Angry UAVs. Funny, in a terrifying kind of way.

Read more at DARPA