Within STRILAB, the Life Guards Brigade's (IB 1) own war incubator, a soldier and a reserve officer have spent five weeks building ELD, a plugin to the situational awareness app ATAK that digitises requests for indirect fire. An order that previously had to be given verbally over the voice network can now be sent as a message in an app. Behind the project lies the very idea of STRILAB: build from the bottom up, from the soldier, rather than from the top down.

STRILAB is the Life Guards Brigade's (IB 1) own war incubator, a combat laboratory where reserve officers and soldiers develop technology and methods from the ground up, using working methods borrowed from the startup world. This summer, a five-week programme is being held for the first time, aimed at turning experiences from this spring's exercises into concrete prototypes. The initiative is run by reserve officers Jakob Blomqvist and Fabian Duke, and according to them, it draws on the brigade's unusually high proportion of part-time soldiers, many of whom are studying technical subjects. NDS met the initiators at a field exercise this spring.

It is within this programme that the ELD project has taken shape, built by two people who ended up in the same project group only this summer. Lukas Nilsson recently completed his conscription service as a mortar soldier at IB 1 and is today a contracted reserve soldier (GSS/T); within STRILAB, he is the developer building the app. Albert Oscarsson is a reserve officer in indirect fire support and a civil engineering student, and leads the project.

They work in the same chain but at different levels. Lukas is at the bottom, at the mortar. Albert plans and coordinates indirect fire at battalion level. Together, they say, they have an unusually complete picture of what the fire control chain looks like, and where it falls short.

The problem they set out to solve is that the fire control chain relies on technology that has not been modernised since the 1990s. Units depend on the old Radio 180, and mortar platoons on wired communication. The latter forces them to concentrate rather than disperse, which makes them vulnerable to, among other things, drone threats. In addition, several of the old systems require trained operators, meaning more personnel than is actually necessary.

The order-giving process is also manual. A fire request is structured according to the mnemonic VISSSTBOA, an acronym that ensures nothing important is left out. The threshold becomes clearest, says Albert, for an ordinary rifleman outside the fire control chain. He lacks his own communications equipment, and the request must therefore be passed on verbally in four steps: from squad leader to platoon commander to company commander and up to the fire support officer.

"Each level has to remember it and repeat it on a new radio system," says Albert. "That makes it slow and complicated, and in practice it's rarely, if ever, practised."

With ELD, they say, the request can instead be sent as a message in the app, directly to the right person.

The solution is built as a plugin to ATAK (Android Team Awareness Kit), an Android application within the American TAK system. ATAK gives units a shared, digital real-time situational picture, all the way down to the individual soldier, and can be seen as a complement to map, compass, overlay and radio. Many already carry it on a phone in their body armour, and encryption is handled by the platform.

"You get a map you can draw on, and a ready-built messaging system," says Lukas.

The goal, he says, is to bring the entire indirect fire chain together in one and the same system: the soldier or forward observer requesting fire, the fire support officer distributing it and the gun crew firing it.

"The whole indirect fire chain should exist in one app, in one system. It should be simple, there shouldn't be room for mistakes, and it shouldn't require unnecessarily large amounts of equipment," says Lukas.

Each role gets its own view, he explains. The fire support officer should see the overall picture, including the positions of the guns, the width of fire and ammunition, while the gun crew only sees what is needed to fire.

In the app, which they demonstrate, the person requesting fire chooses which system should engage: mortar, artillery, FPV drone or anti-tank missile. The target is entered using coordinates, or by direction and distance from a point on the map, together with the type of shell, firing pattern and rate of fire (ammunition expenditure).

What sets ELD apart from larger command and control systems is the direction of development: while those are ordered from the top down, ELD started directly with the end user.

"Everything began with the mortar platoon; that was the first prototype," says Albert. "Then we kept building from the bottom up."

Gradually the chain grew: the forward observer, the fire support officer, the artillery, and, they say, sooner or later FPV drones as well.

Neither of them had built an ATAK plugin, or written code, before. Even so, the choice of ATAK felt natural, they say: it is open source, widely used and well documented, and already one of the communication tools within the Swedish Armed Forces.

"It's an easy way to get a proof of concept," says Albert.

They learned as they went along. Information about ATAK is open but difficult to sort through, and they used Claude (an AI assistant) to help find answers. They also started small: the first prototype was built as a simple web app and shown to prospective users before they spent time on a fully functioning ATAK plugin.

After the five weeks, a finished prototype exists which, according to Lukas and Albert, has already been tested by mortar platoons in Sweden with positive feedback. During the sprint, they have travelled around to various units, including I21 in Sollefteå (northern Sweden) and the Life Guards in Stockholm, to lay the groundwork for autumn trials and to hear what the units need in order to want to test ELD in a live setting.

"You don't wait for someone to tell you what should happen; you go and find the answers yourself," says Albert of the working method.

Where do you want ELD to be in a year?

"Our goal is to get it to the users," says Albert, continuing: "We want to get it out to as many users as possible, as proof that it works."

They have deliberately not yet started a company.

The path forward could go several ways. Either the Swedish Armed Forces takes it up, or the code is sold to an established defence company that handles the documentation and takes the process further towards the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV). What slows things down, they say, is rarely the technology itself but everything around it: method, manuals and the long chain of command.

"If you make a spade, you're expected to write a twenty-page instruction manual on how to use it," says Albert with a glint in his eye. "I think the soldiers can figure it out themselves."