GIS Arta

Ukraine's distributed artillery fire-control software — nicknamed the "Uber for artillery" because, like a ride-hailing app matching a passenger to the nearest free car, it matches a spotted target to the best-placed available gun and pushes a firing solution to it. It cuts the time from target sighting to rounds-on-target from roughly twenty minutes to one or two, which is how a smaller, dispersed Ukrainian artillery force has repeatedly out-shot a numerically superior one. With Delta, it is the second software entry in the BattlePolicy Lexicon — because the system that decides where to shoot is now as decisive as the gun that fires.

Overview

GIS Arta (Geographic Information System Art for Artillery) is a battlefield fire-control and sensor-to-shooter network used by the Armed Forces of Ukraine. A spotter — a drone operator, a forward observer with a smartphone, a counter-battery radar, or a feed pulled from Delta — drops a target onto a shared digital map; the software identifies which artillery, mortar or rocket units are in range and available, weighs munition suitability against target type, calculates the firing solution, and assigns the mission. According to New America, that target-to-fire-mission cycle can run as little as 30–45 seconds; The Times' reporting put "call to trigger" at one to two minutes, against the twenty-plus minutes a conventional process takes. Crucially, it does not require guns to be clustered or observers to carry specialist kit — ordinary phones and tablets connected over military radio, cellular or Starlink will do — which lets batteries disperse, "shoot and scoot," and survive. It is the tactical execution layer beneath Delta's theatre-wide common operating picture.

Development

GIS Arta grew, like much of Ukraine's wartime software, from a single officer's side project rather than a defense prime. In 2013 artillery officer Yaroslav Sherstyuk, a self-taught programmer, wrote ArtOS, a ballistic calculator that let gun commanders compute firing solutions quickly from range and weather data; per New America, he briefly published a smartphone version, then pulled it from the app store when Russia seized Crimea in 2014, after which the Ukrainian military began distributing it officially to units fighting in the Donbas. GIS Arta evolved directly out of that work and, per the system's official site, has been in Armed Forces use since 2014. Its full architecture is classified; Wikipedia notes British digital-mapping firms contributed to its development, and it is often compared to Germany's ESG Adler artillery command software. The design philosophy is deliberately commercial and modular — built and updated like a consumer app, not procured over a decade.

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