According to Forbes, the military is quietly working to integrate Apple computers into its systems to make them harder to hack. Although Mac's are more attractive than their PC counterparts, be sure that security is the main thing behind the U.S. Army's interest in the Apple Computer platform.

Weather you believe that Mac's are more hack proof due to relative obscurity or due to UNIX underpinnings, the fact remans that Macs don't get hacked as much as Windows-based computers.

Lieutenant Colonel C.J. Wallington, a division chief in the Army's office of enterprise information systems, says because fewer attacks have been designed to infiltrate Mac computers, adding more Macs to the military's computer mix makes it tougher to destabilize a group of military computers with a single attack.

In 2005, General Steve Boutelle, the Army's chief information officer began the Army's push for Macs to help protect its computing corps when he gave a speech calling for more diversity in the Army's computer vendors. He argued the approach would both increase competition among military contractors and strengthen its IT defenses.

Accoriding to Michael Rose over at TUAW, one new Leopard feature that may well prove essential to Army use of Mac OS X, which went unremarked in the Forbes story: POSIX compliance. Now that Mac OS X really, truly is UNIX, it could begin to replace HP and Solaris deployments in some military roles.

One thing is certain, and that is that the U.S. Military will make a great ally for Apple in it's war against Microsoft.