The NGC2 race is on—and Rune is tagging in. This morning, the IQT-backed sustainment software startup announced that Lockheed Martin has tapped them to bring a little bit of their contested logistics magic to the prime’s NGC2 prototype OTA contract, awarded in September.
Clean slate: As a refresher, the Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) initiative is the Army’s answer to Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), the military’s push to modernize and integrate information, data, and decision-making across domains and services.
- The goal of NGC2 is to blow up the Army’s stove-piped C2 stack and replace it with a data-centric, software-driven architecture that speeds up how the Army communicates on the battlefield, makes decisions, and passes data for operations.
- It aims to integrate all of the previously siloed warfighting functions—like transport, intel, fires, and communications—onto a single agile software backbone instead of the cobbled-together C2 system comprising 17 often-redundant programs of record.
Heating up: Naturally, the data layer of such a sweeping system is pretty darn important, and the Army is betting that a little competition—and teamwork—will get them what they’re looking for.
- In July, Anduril was awarded a $99M, 11-month OTA contract to prototype a full-stack NGC2 for the Army’s 4th Infantry Division. Anduril’s Lattice Mesh C2 platform is the foundation of the system, but they teamed up with Palantir, Govini, Microsoft, and Striveworks to pitch in on different parts.
- Anduril raced to put a prototype out, stating that they had a working system just eight weeks after the award, but in October, Reuters reported that the Army had issued a memo the month prior that raised some security concerns about it.
- Three days before the reported memo in September, the Army awarded Lockheed, along with teammates Raft and Hypergiant, a $26M, 16-month OTA to prototype the NGC2 data layer for the 25th Infantry Division.
Rune on a run: Now, Team Lockheed is tapping Rune to take care of the sustainment part of their NGC2 data layer prototype. As Tectonic loyalists will know, Rune and their flagship TyrOS logistics and sustainment software have been on a tear since the company’s founding last year.
- TyrOS uses predictive AI and tons of data to track and move gear, fuel, food, and parts around more quickly across domains than legacy sustainment systems.
- It’s built to operate on low-connectivity edge devices down to “the crappiest Dell laptop,” as CEO David Tuttle told Tectonic a few months back, adding that the software runs “down to the lowest tactical levels so that we can feed consumption, expenditure, and personnel data up echelon.”
“Logistics is the backbone of military operations, but it’s too often been treated as a support function rather than an operational advantage,” Tuttle said in a statement. “By joining Lockheed Martin’s NGC2 team, we’re bringing capabilities that harness agentic AI and machine learning to ensure our sustainment operations are predictive rather than reactive.”
Raft, also on Team Lockheed, is itself an AI and logistics company, but Rune will be working with them instead of replacing them. “Our capabilities are complementary,” Tuttle told Tectonic. “Our mesh-capable architecture will integrate with the Raft Data Platform to provide a resilient, edge-enabled and [Denied, Degraded, Intermittent, and Limited]-aware sustainment layer.”
Rune may be a rookie, but this isn’t their first rodeo with the Army. In September, they were awarded a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) from Army DEVCOM and the Combined Arms Sustainment Command (CASCOM) to develop baseline data standards for the Army’s logistics, with an eye on future integration with NGC2 efforts.
According to Tuttle, they’ve already kicked off work with Team Lockheed. “We’re already hard at work integrating with the other partners and elements of Lockheed’s NGC2 prototype,” he said. “The team, led by Lockheed, is making great progress towards a data-centric prototype, and we’re excited to hit the ground running to help them meet the deadlines outlined in this contract.”