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One of Apple's major marketing themes is that Macs are less susceptible to viruses, Trojans, and other hacker attacks than Windows PCs. While that argument has yet to hold much sway with enterprise I.T. departments, it is causing the U.S. Army to add some Macs to its networks.

Following a report from 2005 by General Steve Boutelle, the Army's chief information officer, the new trend in the military is to have as many Macs around as possible, in order to keep information safe. General Boutelle asked in his report that competition among Army contractors be sharpened in order to strengthen IT defenses.

This past year was a particularly tough one for military cybersecurity. Cyberspies infiltrated a Pentagon computer system in June and stole unknown quantities of e-mail data. Later in September, major military contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon were also been hacked.

Lieutenant Colonel C.J. Wallington, a division chief in the Army's office of enterprise information systems, is convinced that Apple’s Macintosh platform, already renowned for its security and for the fact that it has generally been less of target for hackers than Windows, will protect the Army from intrusions.

Out of approximately 700,000 servers and desktops currently in possession of the military personnel, more than 20,000 are Macs, according to Wallington. He estimates that the number is increasing by a thousand every time the Army buys new hardware (twice a year).

One key barrier, besides Apple's price premium and the general I.T. resistance to Apple, has been incompatibility with Common Access Cards, a security key card program the military uses heavily.

By February 2008, a software firm called Thursby Software will make sure that no incompatibility stands between the CAC and the Mac.

Jonathan Broskey, a former Apple employee, is leading the Army’s Apple program. He says it's not just that Macs are a less inviting target than Windows; Apple's version of Unix is inherently more secure than Windows, he says.

The Army's efforts are also being criticized by the likes of Charlie Miller, a researcher with Independent Security Evaluators. Miller comments that while diversification is in the Army's interests, hackers may simply pick the weakest of the two targets, and cause nearly as much damage as they might have otherwise.

Broskey, however, maintains that the large number of patches shows the strength of Apple's reliance on open-source software for its operating system, but that military I.T. will have to be aggressive about deploying the updates. "The Army's no different from any corporation," he says.