The consumer device is already in the fight
This is already happening. Ukrainian forces coordinate operations on personal phones. US Special Operations units carry MacBooks alongside their radios. Task Force 59 ran unmanned systems in 5th Fleet with commercial tablets as control interfaces. Almost 700 frontline US units are now authorized to purchase critical systems directly from commercial vendors.
The defense acquisition system spent decades building purpose-built tactical hardware. Meanwhile, Apple Silicon passed 38 TOPS of neural engine performance in a 2.7-pound laptop with 18-hour battery life. The compute gap between consumer and ruggedized is gone. What remains is a management gap: how do you take a device designed for a coffee shop and make it trustworthy in a SCIF, a TOC, or a patrol base?
That question has a regulatory dimension (CMMC 2.0, DISA STIGs), an operational dimension (classification boundaries, RF suppression, night operations), and a logistics dimension (fleet updates, airgapped delivery, audit trails). No current MDM platform addresses all three.