Another day, another heap of cash being allocated to the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) effort.
Yesterday, “operational intelligence platform” Shift5 announced that it’s been awarded a $99M IDIQ from the US Army to “further support” the mega-project.
- Shift5 first joined NGC2 as part of Anduril’s team back in February.
Shift5 CEO Toby Magsig told Tectonic that the contract “expands Shift5’s role from a prototyping partner to an integrated component of the NGC2 architecture.”
- The company is essentially a real-time, edge analytics company for mission data. In Magsig’s words, they “collect and translate operational data from weapon systems, regardless of asset type or serial protocol, and feed it through [Anduril’s] Lattice to Army systems and third-party applications.”
- They collect “source-of-truth data from various systems onboard ground vehicles and analyze it in real time, on the platform, to spot operational degradation and give a full health picture of that asset” for both operators and the broader C2 system, he explained.
- That data not only keeps users abreast of, like, what’s going on, but also serves as the data layer for any AI deployed on the battlefield.
“The advantage of our platform is that our analytics can feed any application in the ecosystem,” Magsig added. “If the Army needs vehicle health in a situational awareness tool, we can do that. If it needs to go to a sustainment application that schedules parts and downtime, we can do that.”
All in the family: Now, a quick primer on NGC2 for the blessedly unaware among us.
- The monster project aims to take the Army’s cobbled-together command-and-control environment and streamline it into one neat system. That way, everything from transport to logistics to fires can be knit together to speed up decision-making and data-processing.
- Last July, the Army awarded Anduril a $99.6M, 11-month OTA contract to spearhead development of an NGC2 prototype for the Army’s 4th Infantry Division. A Lockheed Martin-led team was also tapped to develop one for the Army’s 25th Infantry Division.
- Anduril’s all-star team includes Palantir, Govini, Microsoft, Rune, and Shift5.
- Then, in June, Anduril was tapped to provide the “common data baseline” for the effort using its flagship Lattice platform (combined with Palantir’s Foundry).
- And then, earlier this month, the neoprime announced it had won a contract worth up to $1.8B over five years to scale Lattice across the entire program.
BFFs: All this means it’s a pretty good idea to figure out whether your platform plays nicely with Lattice. Luckily, Shift5 has already proven it works with Anduril.
- The company integrated with Lattice and supported NGC2 demos during the Army’s Ivy Sting and Project Convergence exercises earlier this year.
- Those exercises, Magsig said, showed them two things: First, they learned (through the whole Anduril ecosystem) how to integrate a range of platforms and players. And second, “by putting [the] technology directly into soldiers’ hands and soliciting their feedback, [they have] been able to rapidly refine [their] data models to solve the specific challenges that are unique to each platform.”
“We can pull anything from engine status, oil pressure, fuel levels and efficiency, ammunition status. We read the signals that tell you when a platform’s performance is degrading before it impacts the mission,” he explained. “Commanders get a readiness picture of their platforms and fleets in real time rather than relying on antiquated manual processes to compile that information.”
Seeing other people: Critically, this is a bit of an “opening the relationship” moment for Shift5. While Anduril “introduced [the company] to the NGC2 ecosystem,” Magsig said, and their work with the company will continue, this contract “establishes a direct contractual relationship between Shift5 and the Army.”
“This contract changes scale – Shift5 is now a component of the architecture rather than a prototype contributor,” he added.
The company could not comment on how much of the IDIQ has been obligated to date.
