Call for fires? There’s an app for that.
Starting this fall, dismounted mortar units across the Army are going to get upgraded to a smartphone and tablet app that will replace the bulkier and decades-old Mortar Fire Control Software and Lightweight Handheld Mortar Ballistics Computer.
While an initial version of the app was introduced in 2023, this upcoming version is debugged and represents the service’s full-scale rollout of the capability.
The app has been more than a decade in development, facing tech glitches and COVID-19 quarantine slowdowns along the way.
Meanwhile, the old platforms have been getting ever more difficult to use.
“Though [they were] effective in their time, as technology improved, the two [old systems] started to show their age,” Army officials said in a news release. “Departing developers took their knowledge with them, and the systems ran on two code bases, accumulating significant technical debt. Additionally, the system software was tied to the platform, so any desire to have it on a new device would require completely [sic] restarting.”
The Marine Corps, which uses the same mortar systems as the Army, was the first to request an app in 2015. Trying to build it as an Android app, as the Corps requested, was where the developer team hit the first major wall, said Julia Gustafson, a computer engineer at the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Armaments Center at Picatinny Arsenal, NJ.
“It’s not as easy as it might sound, because mobile apps are developed for non-life-threatening critical things,” Gustafson told Sandboxx News in an interview. “Android wants to let [users] do things that we don’t think they should be allowed to do.”
Gustafson explained further that Android had features that could get users stuck at a critical process, like a fly-out menu and a back button, which was alienating to Apple users and also unhelpful if you’re in the middle of planning a fire mission and accidentally navigate away.
“If you’re in the middle of filling something out that’s important for a mission, should you be even allowed to hit the back button?” she said. “Those are the things we had to look at and be a lot more intentional with.”
The uncertainty forced Army designers to hit pause on the project until late 2019, Gustafson said. They were moving forward with a new platform-agnostic app when the pandemic hit, slowing down the process and forcing the team to work remotely.
The lengthy and drawn-out process, with its pauses and false starts, was helpful in a way, Gustafson told Sandboxx News, as it forced designers to think differently about what they were working on, and move out of the “mindset rut” established by working on the same technology in the same way for decades.
“We almost had to learn those lessons to get where we are today,” she said.
The app that resulted, she said, can receive calls for fire and be used to create fire missions, helping pull together targeting specifics to compute the firing solution, including deflection, elevation, charging, or propellant, and fuze.
Related: Incredible mortar-assembly challenges with the Green Berets
The app also helps calculate safe geometries, Gustafson said, so that fire teams don’t risk endangering friendly forces. If a mission doesn’t hit the target, the app can also help recompute with adjustments for follow-on missions. When calculations are complete, the mission is still voice-called down to the team, she said.
Thus far, Soldiers have caught on quickly to the app, Gustafson said. Soldier field tests of beta versions during training and exercises was helpful in catching bugs or obstacles to the user workflow, she added.
“There’s only so much you can get from a user input from just playing with it at a desk or showing [users] screenshots online,” she explained. “Having them actually use it in a way that’s representative of how they will be using it, proved to be really valuable.”
In one sense, the long journey of app development exemplifies the classic military challenge of struggling to adapt to a changing world with the speed that current technology requires, and being stuck for too long making do with obsolete systems in the process. But Gustafson said the lessons learned from app development can benefit other military concept development projects.
“We’ve shared it through tech reviews and things like that in our organization, just to say, ‘Don’t don’t wait to modernize, don’t stay stuck in what you’re doing,'” she said. “Everything can be improved, and just because it’s always been that way doesn’t necessarily mean that’s going to be the way for the future … Let’s just start looking to the future and responding to these requests and taking advantage of all these changes that are coming.”
Feature Image: Green Berets from 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) practice shooting mortars on Jan. 22, 2026 at Eglin Air Force Base, FL. The training enhanced their skills to conduct a final culminating exercise that consisted of the suppression of enemy air defense on the range. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Craig Carter)
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