Never mind the mere beta status of the Army’s new app for operating howitzers, soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Carson, Colorado, were itching to find out whether four decades of the existing, error-prone system were finally coming to an end.

So they hooked up their M777 to the novel Artillery Execution Suite during an exercise last month and pulled the lanyard.

Users of the legacy software, the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System, had become accustomed to working around problems.

Troubleshooting was just the normal part of operating the system, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, the 4th ID commander, told Defense News in a recent interview.

The new software, AXS, is a module of the overarching Next-Generation Command-and-Control, or NGC2, envisioned to power all Army batt

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