NGC2, one of the Army’s top priorities, is a clean-slate design for how the service communicates on the battlefield and passes data for operations, providing commanders and units a new approach to information sharing and C2 through agile and software-based architectures. The Army plans to spend almost $3 billion on the effort over the next fiscal year across procurement and research and development funds.

The $99.6 million other transaction authority agreement will span 11 months and cover Anduril’s work to prototype a system for 4^th Infantry Division, which will scale the capability all the way up to the division level. Prior, it was outfitted to an armored battalion, as well as higher headquarters elements, and tested at Project Convergence Capstone 5 at Fort Irwin, California, in March.

Anduril’s partners on the contract include Palantir, Striveworks, Govini, Instant Connect Enterprise, Research Innovations, Inc., and Microsoft, the company said in a statement Friday.

The OTA requires the team to provide an integrated and scalable suite of command and control warfighting capabilities across hardware, software and applications, all through a common and integrated data layer, the Army said.

The Army has pushed teams of industry partners to work on the NGC2 effort, calling for “self-organized” teams.

Anduril had been working previously on the NGC2 effort to produce a prototype that was tested at Project Convergence, along with other vendors.

The prototype award is not the end of the road for other vendors seeking entry into the NGC2 program. The Army said additional vendors can seek to participate through an open commercial solutions offering with additional OTAs expected to be awarded later in fiscal 2026 for prototyping with other units such as 25^th Infantry Division and III Corps headquarters.

“NGC2 is not a one-and-done contract, but a long-term effort of continuous contracting and investment in the technologies that will deliver needed overmatch for our force,” said Brig. Gen. Shane Taylor, program executive officer for command, control, communications and networks.

Army Futures Command has been in charge of the prototyping effort to date, testing a proof of principle and then a proof of concept to demonstrate what is possible, while the program office has been working on the eventual program of record, devising a contracting strategy and seeking vendors.

Army officials have maintained they want to inject and maintain a high level of competition within the program. If contractors aren’t performing, they will seek to build in mechanisms to offboard them and onboard new vendors.

Similarly, the constant competition is also aimed at avoiding vendor lock-in where one partner holds the bulk of the program for an extended period.

The commercial solutions offering allows the Army to maintain a continuous open solicitation with specific “windows” for decision points, the service said, providing opportunities for industry teams aligning incentives and continuously onboarding new vendors as the capability evolves.

“NGC2 uses a combination of flexible and innovative contracting techniques. This is a completely non-traditional, unbureaucratic way to equip Soldiers with the capabilities they need, using expedited contracting authorities,” said Danielle Moyer, executive director of Army Contracting Command – Aberdeen Proving Ground.  

The prototype OTA will allow the Army to continue its momentum toward delivering a solution for units while the commercial solutions offering enables the service to keep looking for capabilities to add to the NGC2 architecture in the future, the service said.

4^th Infantry Division will take the NGC2 system to Project Convergence Capstone 6 next year to test it out in a division holistically, to include the headquarters and enabling units, which have typically been neglected with communication network upgrades.

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This partnership between the two contractors will allow military operators to have a software-defined solution built to deploy fast and operate anywhere with Palantir’s stack running natively on Menace systems.

Menace is described as is a family of fully integrated, turnkey command, control, communications and computing capabilities for users at the tactical edge and on the move. To outpace evolving threats in contested environments, it’s designed to equip operators with automated and resilient comms, data and software.

The two companies are working on a new Menace-I configuration that supports Palantir Edge. This will allow Menace customers to access Palantir capabilities such as Gaia — a geospatial map overlay providing operations and intelligence integration — Target Workbench — a target management system that enablers users to centrally manage intelligence and target identification — and Maverick. Another system known as Menace-T, will be used for on-premises and edge customer deployments.

“The goal is simple: give people in the field access to the software they need on hardware that’s built to withstand the conditions they actually face,” Tom Keane, Anduril’s senior vice president of engineering, said in response to questions.

The U.S. military anticipates it will be operating in austere environments in the future where forces will have to move rapidly to avoid being targeted on an increasingly transparent battlefield, with limited reachback to enterprise capabilities and in congested information spaces.

“The tactical edge is where missions succeed and fail. It’s the most challenging environment- from rugged terrain and spotty communications to the extreme temperatures and external threats,” Keane said. “This partnership ensures that warfighters have near real-time information when and where they need it most. Menace provides more reliable communications pathways, portable systems to bring computing to where it is needed, and durable and rugged hardware. It’s also incredibly quick and easy to set up – and enables warfighters to be up and running in minutes.”

The two companies have been working together for some time, but Keane described this partnership as a formalization of the ongoing collaboration.

He explained that Menace systems supported Palantir software at recent field events, such as Project Convergence Capstone 5. Menace was the compute platform for Palantir software in disconnected and mobile environments and ran Andruil’s Lattice software, acting as a node within the broader Lattice mesh network and demonstrating how multiple tools can operate side-by-side in a single system.

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The move comes as the Navy is trying to move toward what it calls a “hybrid fleet” of crewed and uncrewed systems, including a variety of unmanned underwater vessels and unmanned surface vessels. Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti sees robotic systems and other emerging technologies as a key piece to her vision of the future force, that will help “put more players on the field.”

Maritime drones are seen as a cost-effective means of boosting the Navy’s capacity and capabilities while reducing risks to sailors by keeping them out of harm’s way, at a time when service officials view China as their main competitor and are preparing for a potential conflict in the Pacific region.

“Undersea warfare is critical to success in the Pacific and other contested environments, providing needed autonomous underwater sensing and payload delivery in dispersed, long-range, deep and contested environments is key. Crewed submarines are high-value, high-resource capital platforms necessary for crucial combat missions. In particular, the U.S. military requires a fleet of Large Displacement Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (LDUUVs) with diverse capabilities,” according to a Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) release issued Thursday announcing the awards.

The Navy’s program office for advanced undersea systems —PMS 394 —which falls under Naval Sea Systems Command, is teaming with DIU on the effort.

The Defense Innovation Unit, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley, works to connect the Pentagon with nontraditional contractors and commercial technologies that have military applications. It also aims to move faster than traditional Defense Department acquisition processes, via what it calls a commercial solutions opening, to get companies on contract quickly and move forward with prototyping.

Live demonstrations of the LDUUV technology are slated for March 2024, per the release.

“NAVSEA, in partnership with the DIU, has selected the best-in-breed from industry to rapidly advance new undersea capabilities in the Subsea and Seabed Warfare domain,” Capt. Grady Hill, program manager for PMS 394, said in a statement. “We are accelerating our development plans by utilizing rapid contracting authorities to speed capability to the Fleet.”

The picks were made following what DIU called “a rigorous evaluation process.”

The project isn’t the only maritime drone initiative that DIU is awarding contracts for to support the Navy. Just last week, it issued a solicitation for autonomous unmanned surface vessels that can operate in packs to monitor and intercept adversary ships. The aim is to build 10 or more robo-boats per month.

Separately, the Navy recently took delivery of its first Orca unmanned submarine. The extra-large UUV is intended to be a high-endurance undersea drone with a modular payload bay that can travel long distances autonomously and lay mines or perform other missions.

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In the letter, the firms endorse the findings of the Atlantic Council Commission on Defense Innovation Adoption’s interim report, published in April, which suggested that “the United States does not have an innovation problem, but rather an innovation adoption problem.” The commission, led by former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and former Air Force Secretary Deborah James, shared 10 recommendations meant for defense officials, which will be expanded in a final report in September.

“While most critical technologies being developed today reside in the commercial sector, they are not being leveraged at the speed and scale required for us to maintain advantage relative to our competitors. The time required to develop critical technologies to meet the threat later this decade is no longer the obstacle; it is our inability to scale already-developed commercial technologies into production, iterate upon them, and sustain them in the hands of the warfighter. Our window to act decisively is closing every day,” the letter states.

The letter was signed by leaders from Applied Intuition, Anduril Industries, Floodgate, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Haystack, Hermeus, Kleiner Perkins, Lux Capital, Palantir Technologies, Primer Technologies, Shield Capital and Snowpoint Ventures.

“Silicon Valley companies are driving the innovation that will make a difference in a future conflict,” said Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, and one of the letter’s signees. “Startups, dual-use companies, and other nontraditional defense contractors want to work with the Department of Defense, but often run into barriers that make it difficult to deliver cutting-edge, commercially-derived capabilities to the warfighter at speed and scale.” 

The companies in the letter highlight four recommendations from the Atlantic Council report that will “enable America’s most innovative organizations to step up support for DOD”:

• Modernize the DOD to align with the 21st century industrial base
• Strengthen the alignment of capital markets to DOD outcomes
• Incentivize tech companies to do business with the DOD
• Establish a bridge fund for demonstrated technologies

“We believe that the implementation of these recommendations, as well as the other six recommendations in the Commission’s Interim Report, will dramatically improve the ability of Silicon Valley to deliver the world’s best technologies to the warfighter,” the letter states. “They will rapidly address the DOD’s critical technology gaps through the most promising emerging technologies, and they will construct agile funding structures that make it far more probable that the best commercial innovation can be integrated into the DoD’s systems at scale.”

On the other hand, if the Pentagon does not take action, it “will have missed a unique
opportunity for genuine reform in the ‘decisive decade,'” the firms wrote. “Our competitors will continue to gain ground on the technological battlefield, and we will squander the advantages that accrue from the freest and most innovative marketplace on earth.”

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