Lest you thought Anduril was turning its gaze fully abroad with all that “international weapons hub” talk, think again.
This morning, the defense tech megalith announced that it’s won a $363M contract with US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) for “more than 200 Extended Range Sentry Towers (XRST)…to expand autonomous situational awareness across a much larger portion of the Southwest Border.”
Anduril has already provided more than 350 standard-range Sentry Towers to CBP and has been working with the agency for more than seven years. This new tranche provides longer-range capabilities, and the two sets will form a “layered network that provides persistent, comprehensive coverage across both broad and complex border terrain.”
Common sense: We talk a lot about Anduril’s buzzy, go-boom stuff, but the Sentry Tower is actually one of the company’s OG products.
- The telephone-pole-with-a-tripod-like platform uses AI to detect, identify, classify, and track people, vehicles, drones, boats, and other objects of interest.
- Each tower is outfitted with a mix of electro-optical cameras, thermal sensors, radar, and communications equipment, depending on the mission.
- All of that data is fed into Anduril’s Lattice, and basically alerts operators when there is a potential threat—rather than making them watch video feeds all day.
- Sentry Towers were first deployed as part of CBP’s AST (Autonomous Surveillance Tower) pilot program in 2018, and the program was expanded along the border in 2019. AST became a CBP program of record in 2020.
- They also have versions of the towers built for maritime and cold-weather environments, and unveiled a 5G version for remote comms earlier this spring.
- According to Anduril, the towers have helped identify and interdict hundreds of thousands of border crossings since the beginning of the company’s partnership with CBP. The towers cover over 30 percent of the US’s southern land border, according to the company.
Big boys: These new towers are basically Sentry Towers, but supercharged.
- XRST (launched in 2024) is an 80-foot tower “equipped with high-performance sensors to autonomously detect, classify, and track objects of interest at ranges exceeding 5 miles,” according to a company statement.
- To put that range increase in perspective—XRST can track objects up to 12km away, compared to Standard Range Sentry’s 2.8- 3.5 km range.
- The towers will be deployed along the Southern border, though the company could not say exactly where (security tings).
Welp. The rise of the neoprime continues.