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  • Defense tech firms establish AI-focused consortium

    Defense tech firms establish AI-focused consortium

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    Palantir and Anduril, two leading defense technology firms, announced today they’re creating an industry consortium to address what they see as hurtles impeding the Defense Department’s adoption of AI.

    “Our goal is to deliver the technological infrastructure, from the edge to the enterprise, that can enable our government and industry partners to transform America’s world-leading AI advancements into next-generation military and national security capabilities,” the companies said Friday in joint statement.

    Both firms are key players in the Pentagon’s AI and software ecosystem. Palantir builds platforms to analyze and distill data and Anduril develops a range of advanced hardware and software systems largely centered on autonomy and AI.

    The companies are teamed on the Army’s Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node program, an integrated, AI-defined targeting system set to begin fielding over the next two years.

    Palantir also provides the core software enabling the Army’s data platform that supports leaders across the force to provide overall visibility and support rapid decision-making — a contract it’s had since 2017. The Army uses it for unit readiness, managing combat power, logistics and installations and even recruiting.

    Anduril, meanwhile, is providing hardware and software for the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative, which aims to field thousands of small, networked drones by next August.

    For this new partnership, the companies will build on existing product lines, including Palantir’s AI Platform, AIP, and Anduril’s Menace, a software-defined command and control system.

    The goal is to address two key problems they see as inhibiting the U.S. military’s adoption of AI: data readiness and the lack of a secure pipeline for scaling industry’s AI models.

    To get after the second problem, the team plans to use AIP to deliver a cloud-based data management capability that can deliver AI data at all classification levels. They also plan to combine Palantir’s Maven Smart System with Anduril’s Lattice software to provide “a seamless operational capability” for developing and fielding new AI tools across the defense enterprise.

    “This platform is already in place and in use by Anduril and Palantir for their own corporate purposes, and with government contracts that enables this work to begin immediately,” the companies said.

    The plan is ultimately to grow the partnership to include more firms.

    News of the consortium comes amid announcements of several other industry collaborations involving the two companies. Anduril said Thursday it would team with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to use AI algorithms to improve the military’s counter-drone capabilities.

    And Palantir announced today it is joining forces with Booz Allen Hamilton to advance defense innovation among U.S. allies. That partnership focuses on modernizing defense infrastructure and using data-centric tools to improve collaboration among partner nations.

    Maintaining tech competition

    Two U.S. senators this week, meanwhile, introduced legislation that calls for the Defense Department to implement guardrails to maintain competition for major technology development programs.

    The bill — championed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, and Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo. — targets DOD’s AI and cloud computing programs, portfolios that it says are dominated by a handful of Silicon Valley companies.

    “Right now, all of our eggs are in one giant Silicon Valley basket. That doesn’t only stifle innovation, but it’s more expensive and it seriously increases our security risks,” Warren said in a statement. “Our new bill will make sure that as the Department of Defense keeps expanding its use of AI and cloud computing tools, it’s making good deals that will keep our information secure and our government resilient.”

    Specific provisions in the bill include a requirement that DOD conduct an open competition for any AI or data integration programs with annual contracts worth at least $50 million.

    It would also direct the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office to ensure that any government data used to build or operate the military AI tools be secured and protected — particularly if it’s being stored alongside vendor data.

    Land warfare reporter Jen Judson contributed to this story.

    Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.

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  • Pentagon green-lights counter-drone strategy amid ‘urgent’ threat

    Pentagon green-lights counter-drone strategy amid ‘urgent’ threat

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    Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed off on a classified strategy Monday for countering drone threats in an effort to unify the military’s approach to protecting its facilities and personnel from weaponized unmanned aerial systems.

    “Unmanned systems pose both an urgent and enduring threat to U.S. personnel, facilities, and assets overseas,” the Pentagon said in a statement Thursday announcing the strategy. “By producing a singular Strategy for Countering Unmanned Systems, the Secretary and the Department are orienting around a common understanding of the challenge and a shared approach to addressing it.”

    One-way aerial drone attacks have spiked in recent years, and the Pentagon has grown increasingly concerned by the threats they pose to the U.S. and its allies. For more than a year, Iran-backed Houthi rebel groups have been using small unmanned aerial systems, or UAS, to target ships in the Red Sea, and killer drones have featured heavily in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

    DOD officials have said the department is taking a layered approach to defending against enemy drones, meaning the U.S. will pursue a range of capabilities to disable these systems, from electronic warfare to kinetic weapons. The military services have a number of ongoing programs to develop and field this technology.

    Austin’s strategy is aligned with these and other high-level DOD efforts, including those led by the Joint Counter-Small UAS office, which was established in 2019 to coordinate counter-UAS development, tactics and training across the military services.

    The strategy also closely follows the second phase of Replicator, which is focused on rapidly fielding off-the-shelf counter-drone technology. Austin, who announced Replicator 2 in September, said the Pentagon plans to request funding in fiscal 2026 and set a two-year timeline for delivering “meaningfully improved” counter-UAS systems.

    An unclassified fact sheet released Thursday sheds some light on the department’s strategy, laying out five lines of effort it plans to pursue. These include: improving its ability to detect, track and characterize counter-drone threats; launching focused campaigns to counter “threat networks”; making counter-drone defense a core piece of its doctrine, training and policy; quickly fielding counter-UAS technology and prioritizing funding for these capabilities; and placing a greater emphasis on countering unmanned systems in its force development and design efforts.

    The strategy emphasizes the need for partnerships with Congress, defense and commercial industries and allies. It also pledges to create clear metrics to track its progress, though it’s unclear if those details will be publicly released.

    “This strategy marks a critical next step in the Department of Defense’s efforts to counter unmanned systems, but much work lies ahead,” the fact sheet states. “Although the rapidly evolving nature of the threats posed by adversary use of unmanned systems means that the department will need to continually reassess our efforts, this strategy sets a foundation for action to meet this challenge.”

    Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.

    Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.

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  • Anduril, OpenAI partner to boost counter-drone tech for bases, troops

    Anduril, OpenAI partner to boost counter-drone tech for bases, troops

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    Defense technology firm Anduril Industries announced this week it will partner with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to use the company’s artificial intelligence models to improve the U.S. military’s ability to protect its bases and personnel from drone attacks.

    “Anduril and OpenAI will explore how leading edge AI models can be leveraged to rapidly synthesize time-sensitive data, reduce the burden on human operators and improve situational awareness,” Anduril said in a statement Wednesday. “These models, which will be trained on Anduril’s industry-leading library of data on CUAS threats and operations, will help protect U.S. and allied military personnel and ensure mission success.”

    The companies did not disclose whether there is funding attached to the agreement, which continues a recent trend of large AI firms partnering with the defense industry. In November, Anthropic and Palantir announced they would work with Amazon Web Services to sell Anthropic’s AI models to defense and intelligence agencies.

    The partnership comes amid growing concerns about weaponized drones, which have been used against U.S. and allied forces in the Middle East and Ukraine.

    In June, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that a slew of attacks by Iran-backed groups on shipping vessels in the Red Sea affected 65 countries and 29 major energy and shipping firms.

    The Pentagon is working to push cutting-edge counter-drone technology to the military services through the second phase of its Replicator program, created to bypass the sluggish acquisition processes that keep the Defense Department from adopting and scaling technology.

    Anduril is on contract to provide hardware and software for the first iteration of Replicator, which is on track to field thousands of small drones by next summer. The firm also announced a $250 million contract to deliver 500 of its Roadrunner counter drone systems to an unnamed Defense Department customer.

    And earlier this week, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office awarded Anduril a $100 million contract to increase production of its Lattice Mesh networking capability. The Defense Department is already using the data distribution platform at a small scale, but the three-year CDAO contract will make it available to all services and combatant commands.

    Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.

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  • Anduril, OpenAI partner to boost counter-drone tech for bases, troops

    Anduril, OpenAI partner to boost counter-drone tech for bases, troops

    [ad_1]

    Defense technology firm Anduril Industries announced this week it will partner with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI to use the company’s artificial intelligence models to improve the U.S. military’s ability to protect its bases and personnel from drone attacks.

    “Anduril and OpenAI will explore how leading edge AI models can be leveraged to rapidly synthesize time-sensitive data, reduce the burden on human operators and improve situational awareness,” Anduril said in a statement Wednesday. “These models, which will be trained on Anduril’s industry-leading library of data on CUAS threats and operations, will help protect U.S. and allied military personnel and ensure mission success.”

    The companies did not disclose whether there is funding attached to the agreement, which continues a recent trend of large AI firms partnering with the defense industry. In November, Anthropic and Palantir announced they would work with Amazon Web Services to sell Anthropic’s AI models to defense and intelligence agencies.

    The partnership comes amid growing concerns about weaponized drones, which have been used against U.S. and allied forces in the Middle East and Ukraine.

    In June, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that a slew of attacks by Iran-backed groups on shipping vessels in the Red Sea affected 65 countries and 29 major energy and shipping firms.

    The Pentagon is working to push cutting-edge counter-drone technology to the military services through the second phase of its Replicator program, created to bypass the sluggish acquisition processes that keep the Defense Department from adopting and scaling technology.

    Anduril is on contract to provide hardware and software for the first iteration of Replicator, which is on track to field thousands of small drones by next summer. The firm also announced a $250 million contract to deliver 500 of its Roadrunner counter drone systems to an unnamed Defense Department customer.

    And earlier this week, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office awarded Anduril a $100 million contract to increase production of its Lattice Mesh networking capability. The Defense Department is already using the data distribution platform at a small scale, but the three-year CDAO contract will make it available to all services and combatant commands.

    Courtney Albon is C4ISRNET’s space and emerging technology reporter. She has covered the U.S. military since 2012, with a focus on the Air Force and Space Force. She has reported on some of the Defense Department’s most significant acquisition, budget and policy challenges.

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  • Army eyes autonomous missile launcher and 1,000-kilometer strikes

    Army eyes autonomous missile launcher and 1,000-kilometer strikes

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    Update: This article has been revised to include the scheduled start of increment 5 for the Precision Strike Missile.

    The Army’s next step in expanding the distance and survivability of its land-based rockets could see a missile delivered from an autonomous launcher to strike targets farther than 1,000 kilometers away.

    On Tuesday, Maj. Gen. Winston Brooks, commander of the Fires Center of Excellence at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and Brig. Gen. Rory Crooks, director of the Cross Functional Team-Long Range Precision Fires, discussed future work on “Increment 5″ of the Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM.

    If successful, the project would give even low-level tactical units the ability to conduct what are known as “strategic deep fires,” which range beyond 500 kilometers, according to Army data.

    RELATED

    Defense News reported that in November the Army conducted its first two PrSM salvo tests at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. The testing involved firing the two missiles in rapid succession.

    Testers used the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, launcher.

    In his remarks Tuesday, Crooks cautioned that while there is much potential for developing the fires platform with the autonomous launcher, there isn’t yet a timeline for fully developing and fielding that technology.

    But the missile is slated to enter its science and technology phase in October 2025.

    Currently, the missile is limited by its platform. The M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS pod, is 13 feet long.

    Crooks noted that because the autonomous platform doesn’t need a cab for a human driver, there could be a chance to put a longer missile on the frame at some point.

    The PrSM program seeks to replace legacy systems such as the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System, the same weapon used by Ukrainian forces for the first time in October 2023 to strike Russian targets.

    The U.S. missiles used by Ukrainians had shorter maximum distances than those used by the U.S. Army, limiting them to less than 300 kilometers, Military Times previously reported. The same system has been used more recently for deeper strikes into Russian territory.

    The Increment 1 versions of the PrSM are being fielded now by Lockheed Martin. Those missiles have a range of at least 500 kilometers, according to the company.

    Increment 2 is a land-based, anti-ship seeker; Increment 3 will add lethal payload options; and the Increment 4 project is seeking to push existing ranges beyond 1,000 kilometers.

    Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

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  • Marines take steps to hack human performance with data

    Marines take steps to hack human performance with data

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    After years of deliberation, the Marine Corps is taking its first steps to embrace a program that would aim to make jarheads the most lethal versions of themselves — from sleep and stress level control to marksmanship.

    The Office of Naval Research has begun work on an initiative known as Warrior Resiliency, which would use wearable technology and other data sensors to develop sophisticated predictions about how to supercharge Marines’ performance and adapt training for maximum effect.

    The effort, which was funded through a $4.4 million allocation in fiscal 2024, is taking shape as the Army trumpets early successes of its Holistic Health and Fitness program, which aims to “unlock … peak performance” by giving soldiers access to expert coaches and equipment.

    But the roots of Warrior Resiliency and similar efforts, according to those close to the initiative, date back years — to the Pentagon’s Close Combat Lethality Task Force, spearheaded by then-defense secretary Jim Mattis.

    Established in 2018, the CCLTF aimed to close key capability gaps with joint solutions. One of those identified gaps was the individual performance of warfighters; a 2018 Defense Department memo establishing the task force directs that science and technology be leveraged to improve human performance “within ethical guidelines.”

    But according to Chief Warrant Officer 5 Stephen LaRose, who served on the task force as an adviser and program manager until 2023, the Corps has struggled to put meaningful investment and support behind a program that would achieve these aims.

    Despite a variety of limited objective experiments, he said, “there hasn’t been any program that’s been comprehensive enough … that would transition to a human performance program of record.”

    Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center instructors hike as three-man glacier teams alongside Argentine marines to the summit of a mountain range in Argentina on Sept. 6. (Cpl. Samuel Qin/U.S. Marine Corps)

    A 2021 collaboration with Army Combat Capabilities Development Command resulted in an “Optimizing the Human Weapons System (OHWS)” roadmap to a Marine Corps program that would use wearables and smart devices to create a sophisticated dashboard showing troops’ “wellness inputs,” such as alcohol consumption and physical exercise, training load, sleep data and recovery stats.

    A presentation of the plan, reviewed by Marine Corps Times, shows a timeline of milestones leading up to a needs analysis to be completed by Marine Corps Warfighting Lab in 2023.

    That year, Brig. Gen. Kyle Ellison, then the commander of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, linked OHWS and Warrior Resiliency in an endorsement letter, calling for resources to establish a service program of record.

    Peter Squire, ONR’s program officer for Human Performance Training and Education, told Marine Corps Times that Warrior Resiliency, in its current form, aims to create readiness “status indicators” for unit leaders by assessing Marines’ biometrics to prevent injury and optimize performance.

    He noted that maturing wearable and biometric tracking technology enabled better and more effective monitoring now than had previously been possible.

    “It’s really been, I think, within the past five years or so that we’ve seen the ability for accurate commercial wearable devices that can be used in a more continuous or persistent manner, where we can get information now to better understand status and indicators over time,” he said. “So, it’s sort of been the culmination of a couple different aspects over time, where we saw there was a good opportunity to put it forward.”

    Many of the specifics of the effort remain under wraps. The first priority of Warrior Resiliency, which got underway in earnest last spring, has been the establishment of predictive algorithms and frameworks for processing data and making decisions.

    Some experimentation has been conducted with active Marine Corps units, Squire said, although he declined to name which ones, pending the service’s authorization. The specific devices to be used in widespread data collection are still pending.

    “Right now, we are focused on utilizing what the commercial market has available, and have working partnerships with a variety of different vendors,” Squire said.

    Device accuracy will be a priority, he added, and the form factor of devices used — armbands versus rings or watches, for example — may depend on individual Marines’ preferences or their job duties.

    Ultimately, Warrior Resiliency will be a “multi-year effort” resulting in prototype platforms and “knowledge products” to help the Corps establish a broad-edged program within the operating forces, Squire said.

    He compared the expected result to the Corps’ Marksmanship Campaign Plan, released earlier this year, that represented the service’s most aggressive reimagining of arms training and skills development in a century.

    Within the next eight months, he expects the Corps and ONR to reach decisions around larger-scale system testing and next steps, he said.

    For LaRose, concerns remain that the Corps will fully embrace the work being done and build human performance assessment into regular training and operations.

    “Every Marine a rifleman, but we got to get past the [sole focus on] marksmanship,” he said. “You’re … using the rifle to get to the stress, to the decisions, to the finite motor skills.”

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