Thoughts on Mandatory Issued Govt Cell-Phones for All

Well if the Telecommunications Act '96 (military discount) actually applied to everyone in all situations it wouldn't even be an idea worth debating, since most of us already have phones. By this I mean if you are married, to get that discount & be able to turn your phone off during deployments you have to have separate billing; no family plans/ shared minutes, data or anything through the phone company, which is more expensive when you are home-station. Unless you sign a new contract every time you leave & return.

I have a perfectly good cell phone. If a soldier truly can't pay for a cell bill (and they can get really expensive!), I don't see much of a problem. However, unless that government phone comes with an electric shock app, a phone is a phone. If somebody wants to ignore the call, they will.
My husband owns a Pebble. He loves it. I think it's overkill considering he already has his cell on him anyway, but whatever.

I have one. It's a blackberry, so it blows, but trust me...you don't want one. It allows email use...that's pretty much all it's good for. I could use it to reduce the cost on my personal phone, but I'm only going to have this one while I'm in this job, so it's not worth everyone using my blackberry number. Besides...look at the government credit card problem. We make everyone get those...and that's gone swimmingly.

I don't want the Army to issue me anything else, ever. Especially a cell phone. Who I call or text is my business, not the Army's. Sure as hell they'd track calls and locations.

Honestly, the benefit to cost/risk ratio is just way too high. Sure, you could reach out to everyone any time, any where. But...at what cost?

Presuming a an active end strength of 490K (from: http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=121771):

If you lowball it and say $50 per phone, that comes to $24.5M in hardware alone. That number jumps to $52.1M for the total force (strength taken from the same article.) Now, consider the contract for service and replacement for lost, stolen or damaged phones? (The DC metro recovers an average of from 300 to 450 cell phones a MONTH)

Incidentally, your comment about email capability implies a smart phone, so you can realistically probably double that dollar figure.)

Next, how much time/energy will be used to identify patterns of personal use/abuse of the government phones? Ask anyone who has spent time in recruiting command.

What about our key civilian personnel? We rely on many of them to the same degree we rely on military leaders. Do we give them phones? Do we pay them for the time they spend answering emails "off the clock" because there is a spoken or implied command expectation of immediate contact around the clock?

Let's think about OPSEC as well. Some may recall a story about local pizza delivery stores being alerted that something was happening during Desert Storm because of a large number of delivery orders to the Pentagon. Not sure if that's true or not, but wouldn't a spike in the use of government cells (e.g. an alert) be a key indicator? Also, as others have noted, anything that can be encrypted, an be decrypted. The potential for classified spillage is extremely high -- it shouldn't be, but it happens, even with senior personnel.

Sorry, but the cost and risk just aren't worth the reward. Most of our people already have a cell phone and the good old recall roster works quite well.