Planning the details of a military convoy with numerous vehicles, personnel, weapons, radios and other details can take a platoon leader three days. 

In addition to plotting a safe route, leaders need to map out checkpoints to track the convoy’s progress, assign personnel, and track all the weapons and gear.

Capt. Christopher Reif, a software operations officer and Warrant Officer One Jesus Ambrocio, a software operations technician, have cut the days of time involved down to at most 30 minutes through a new convoy operations planning app. It’s the first soldier-developed software for Next Generation Command and Control, the Army’s new communications system, Reif explained.

The 4th Infantry Division is helping to test and prototype the expansive new Next Generation Command and Control system this month at the National Training Center in California. The new app was made possible by the communications system that is uniting old and siloed technology.

The app is focused on planning out the movements of battalion-sized convoys and smaller, Reif said. Such a plan can incorporate 50 different vehicles along with all the weapons systems and radios the soldiers will need. 

The app was built after spending two months working with soldiers to understand the technical problems they are facing in the field, the two soldiers said, and it’s addressed a ton of the issues they identified. 

They hope it will give back platoon- and company-level leaders hours of time. 

“That time could be better spent checking in on their soldiers (and) planning the actual mission,” Reif said. 

Previously, parts of the plan were tracked in Excel, while routes and checkpoints were sketched out on plastic-covered maps with dry-erase markers.

The new app brings route, personnel and gear planning together and then translates it into a presentation for commanders, Reif said.

As changes are made in the planning software, it automatically updates the presentation. 

“I can go tell my platoon sergeant five minutes before my brief to modify the route, and I know for a fact that what I’m gonna present is accurate and true, Reif said.  

The two have been building out the app over about eight months, and so far more than 200 convoys have been built using the software, he said, during an interview in June.

During the development process, they have taken direct feedback from soldiers, who asked for the map to incorporate the military grid reference system, Ambrocio said. The two made the change in a week. 

“I think it’s great that we’re here on the ground and we’re hearing feedback directly from the soldiers,” Ambrocio said. 

Eventually, the two would like to see the software track a convoy’s progress in real time, a feature that would be made possible by the new distributed network built into the Next Generation Command and Control, Reif said. 

There is also already strong interest from soldiers across the Army in the app, but users must have the whole communications upgrade for the new application to work, Reif explained, because it relies on the new common data layer. 

As Next Generation Command and Control gets integrated Army-wide, the new convoy operations app is expected to be part of that upgrade, Reif said.