There is historic and persistent need for a unified SA system for law enforcement and other public safety personnel. A unified SA system will include personnel accountability (knowing who is where) during a crisis is paramount for responders at all levels. In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the use of smartphones by law enforcement and public safety agencies. Smartphones have become a powerful tool for blue force tracking (BFT) and mission planning.

Many applications exist which take advantage of smartphones for BFT, but very few of them can communicate with each other. The lack of interoperability between disparate tools presently allows for scenarios where dangerous blue on blue or blue on green contact could occur. By using a central hub (in this case TAK Server), all SA data has a single focal point ensuring uniformity.  

The Team Awareness Kit (TAK) provides real-time access and collaboration channels to organizations within the Homeland Security Enterprise in various cost models. When we think of situational awareness for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) team operators, we often think of split second delivery of information and life saving alerts to inform those who help protect us in an emergency. TAK is one of those breakthroughs in technology.

Over the past five years, DHS Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) has successfully leveraged this system to support federal agency response during natural disasters and coordinated operations. TAK clients use the native communications built into the hardware (e.g. cellular, wi-fi, etc.) to pass data across an existing network to the TAK server (and onto other devices with TAK clients). ATAK supports a "plug-in" architecture, which allows non-native communications provided by external communications devices (e.g. SATCOM, MANET, etc.), to interface with ATAK and pass data across the networks created by those external communication devices. This allows ATAK to be used with technologies which solve many of the current "comms" issues encountered by end users.