Techlink published an article, here, on ATAK licensing that goes along with the video.
Black Hawk Down (Battle of Mogadishu, Somalia) was the incident that triggered development of a powerful situational awareness tool by engineers at the AFRL Information Directorate. “People could not execute their missions because they didn’t know where everyone else was,” said Ralph Kohler, Principal Engineer at the directorate and chief architect of the technology development.
Thinking over the incident, Kohler realized that there was a strong need for a tool that would provide users with an up-to-the-second understanding of their operational environment. He and a group of engineers and specialists at the Air Force Research Lab developed the software and packaged it as a smartphone app called ATAK.
