WASHINGTON — Anduril announced today that the Army has awarded the company a contract to develop a Battle Manager prototype, which the company describes as an “integrated command-and-control platform” aimed at defending against various air and missile threats across the Indo-Pacific theater.
The “integrated” portion of the system comes from Anduril’s Lattice software, which would allow the Army to collect and combine information from separate, existing missile-defense systems and transform that data into a comprehensive picture. As the Army operates now, commanders often have to collect information from different systems when creating a comprehensive threat picture, which the service has stated wastes precious time when trying to make quick decisions during a conflict.
“As warfare becomes increasingly data-driven and multi-domain, the number of systems our armed forces rely on will grow exponentially. This is an especially important dynamic in the defense of the Western Pacific — its extant missile-defense systems are composed of a layered mix of systems from across multiple services and domains,” Anduril’s press release read.
In order to break apart such data silos, the Lattice software assigns sensors on various weapons systems a specific observation of data-collection tasks, so human operators can know “when, where, and how to engage systems against inbound missile threats,” the company explained in the release. By having all this data together, commanders are able to have a constantly-updated threat picture.
Further, the software also provides modeling and simulation tech that creates “mission-realistic models” that help commanders to “test, validate, and optimize the system in a high-fidelity environment,” per the release.
The Army did not respond to a request for comment on whether other vendors were awarded the Battle Management prototype.
Anduril’s announcement today comes after the Army revealed a program last week, dubbed Right to Integrate (R2I), where the service and nine defense contractors — one being Anduril — will launch a sequence of hackathons in which the companies will integrate their own data into a common operating picture.
Upon the program’s release, the service described R2I as “an Army-Industry partnered sprint that will ensure offensive and defensive weapon systems, and business systems across the Army, can collectively integrate, share data and communicate with each other.”
Further, during a roundtable last week, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told reporters that “it is sincerely, truly and intellectually honestly true to say” that the R2I program is “the largest hackathon to ever happen in human history.” He added that the companies and the Army are going to “break apart” between hundreds and thousands of pieces of equipment to get them all to communicate in “near real time.”
An Anduril spokesperson confirmed to Breaking Defense ahead of today’s announcement that the R2I and Battle Manager efforts are not related.
