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 for the situational awareness app ATAK that digitalises 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, aiming to transform experiences from this spring's exercises into concrete prototypes. The initiative is led by reserve officers Jakob Blomqvist and Fabian Duke, and, according to them, builds on the brigade's unusually large 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 conscript service as a mortar soldier with IB 1 and is today a contracted part-time soldier (GSS/T); within STRILAB he is the developer building the app. Albert Oscarsson is a reserve officer within indirect fire and an engineering student, and leads the project.
They work in the same chain but at different levels. Lukas is at the very bottom, by 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 is failing.
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 are dependent on the old Radio 180, and mortar platoons on wired communication. The latter forces them to group together rather than spread out, making them vulnerable to threats including drones. In addition, several of the old systems require trained operators, meaning more personnel than is actually needed.
The order-giving process itself 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, Albert says, for an ordinary rifleman outside the fire control chain. He lacks his own communications equipment, so the request must 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," Albert says. "That makes it slow and complicated, and in practice it is 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 for 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 soldier level, and can be seen as a complement to map, compass, overlay and radio. Many already carry it on their 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," Lukas says.
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 the 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 should be no risk of mistakes, and it shouldn't require unnecessarily large amounts of equipment," Lukas says.
Each role gets its own view, he explains. The fire support officer should see the full picture, including the positions of the guns, firing width and ammunition, while the gun crew sees only what is needed to fire.
In the app, which they demonstrate, the person requesting fire selects which system should engage: mortar, artillery, FPV drone or anti-tank missile. The target is given using coordinates, or by direction and distance from a point on the map, together with the type of round, firing pattern and rate of fire.
What distinguishes ELD from larger command and control systems is the direction of development: whereas such systems are typically commissioned from the top, ELD started directly from the end user.
"Everything began with the mortar platoon, that was the first prototype," Albert says. "Then we kept building from the bottom up."
Gradually the chain grew: the forward observer, the fire support officer, the artillery and, they believe, sooner or later FPV drones as well.
Neither of them had built an ATAK plugin, or written code, before. The choice of ATAK still 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," Albert says.
They learned as they went along. Information about ATAK is open but difficult to sort through, and for that they used Claude to 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 functional 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 travelled around to various units, including I21 in Sollefteå (northern Sweden) and the Life Guards in Stockholm (the Swedish capital), to lay the groundwork for this autumn's trials and tests, and to hear what the units need in order to want to test ELD in live conditions.
"You don't wait for someone else to say what should happen, you go and find the answers yourself," Albert says of the way of working.
Where do you want ELD to be in a year's time?
"Our goal is to get it to the users," Albert says, and continues: "We want to roll it out to as many users as possible, as proof that it works."
They have deliberately not started a company yet.
The road ahead could go several ways. Either the Swedish Armed Forces take 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 argue, is rarely the technology itself but everything around it: method, manuals and the long chain of command.
"If you make a spade, you're supposed to have a twenty-page instruction manual for how to use it," Albert says with a glint in his eye. "I think the soldiers can figure it out themselves."