Break out the popcorn, y’all. Yesterday, the Army announced its second award for Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) prototyping—this time, a $26M 16-month OTA to a team led by Lockheed Martin. The super-prime and its team will deliver their prototype to the 25th Infantry Division.
This comes a little over a month after the service awarded a team led by Anduril a $99.6M, 11-month OTA to build their own NGC2 prototype. Between CCA and this, it seems the time has finally come for everyone’s favorite defense tech company to show us what they’ve got against the primes.
“This isn’t the end of competition, this is the beginning. Through these two industry team lead agreements, we’ll evaluate different models for shared responsibility and aligned incentives during the NGC2 prototyping phase,” Joseph Welch, deputy to the commanding general, Army Futures Command, said in a statement.
As Army CTO Alex Miller told us back in July, Welch said that pitting the teams against each other should result in a command and control system that actually delivers what the force needs.
“By encouraging companies to self-organize and team with each other and enabling them to integrate and solve these problems directly with the operational force, we will be able to rapidly and continuously improve the command and control capabilities we deliver to soldiers,” he said.
On lock: First up, a bit of a backgrounder. For the uninitiated, NGC2 is the Army’s answer to Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), the military’s push to weave information, data, and decision-making across all domains (land, air, sea, space, and cyber) and services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force).
Think of it as a huge, AI-powered brain that could basically keep tabs on and control everything that the DoD does—or wants to do. This is a pretty big deal because historically, command and control is a patchwork of different systems—the Army’s C2 alone has been cobbled together from 17 programs of record.
- The idea for the pie-in-the-sky C2 program was first introduced in 2020 under the first Trump administration, but floundered because of (lol) funding and coordination gaps between the services.
- The DoD managed to churn out a classified JADC2 strategy in 2021 and released a formal implementation plan in 2022.
Each service rolled out its own version of the super-powered C2 system from 2021 through 2023. Yes, we are aware that that does seem to defeat the point.
- Project Overmatch for the Navy
- Project Convergence/NGC2 for the Army
- Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) for the Air Force
Team up: According to a release by Lockheed, the prime’s NGC2 team will include AI and logistics platform Raft and AI software company Hypergiant, among others. The company says it will build its NGC2 prototype using “Application Programming Interfaces and a Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA)” that will make third-party integration, development, and innovation easier.
And according to the Army, Team Lockheed will focus on the integrated data layer of NGC2, which will allow the service to “assess NGC2 software options.” The setup will be supported by the Army’s C2 Fix transport and infrastructure capabilities already used by the 25th Infantry Division. The goal is to see how NGC2 can work with the capabilities already at play.
Through their team, Lockheed also highlighted that they’ll “empower small businesses, non-traditional innovators and commercial technology providers.” Are the primes playing nice?
Race to coordinate: Team Lockheed’s main competitor is Team Anduril—including heavyweights like Palantir, Govini, Microsoft, and Striveworks—which is deploying with the 4th Infantry Division.
For their part, Anduril said in July their team is building an end-to-end system that “modernize[s] the service’s communications and networking technologies.” The Army says team Anduril is “conducting prototyping across applications, data, infrastructure, and transport within a full ‘technology stack.’”
Buddy-buddy: The idea of the competition structure is that each division will test the prototypes, see what works, and the stuff that does will be scaled. And as for the stuff that doesn’t? In the bin.
“Rather than being stuck with one prime forever, we have more flexibility and negotiating leverage to incentivize good behavior and disincentivize bad behaviors,” Army CTO Alex Miller told Tectonic back in July.
Plus, breaking the system down makes it more manageable, and the team structure puts more of the onus on the team leader to drive success—rather than the Army. “It’s like a rugby team—coach can interface with the players but the team leader has to lead,” Miller said.
“When you have something that big and beefy you risk it becoming so unwieldy as to not be manageable because a single prime contractor or lead systems integrator treats it like a black box,” he added. “[This] approach for NGC2 lets us stand up the infrastructure, stand up the data layer, and immediately get feedback from users and continuously iterate on each component.”
Basically, it’s survival of the fittest, defense software edition. Now, time to see who’s got what it takes.