Defense technology company Anduril Industries has secured a major contract with the U.S. Army worth up to $1.8 billion over five years. The agreement provides for scaling the Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) system for military operations. The contract’s initial base period is worth $162.8 million and calls for deploying the software architecture, starting with the U.S. Army’s I Corps in the Pacific region.
The contract marks a significant transition in the defense program: the NGC2 system is moving from division-level field prototyping to full operational deployment. Under the agreement, Anduril’s Lattice software serves as a distributed common data layer, bringing disparate sensors, weapon systems, and combat applications together in a unified operational network.
The defense contractor previously demonstrated the platform’s capabilities during large-scale, multidomain field exercises involving the 4th Infantry Division. In the trials, the common architecture connected more than 2,500 user devices and reduced artillery mission execution time by 90% compared with legacy systems, while maintaining connectivity in degraded communications environments.
Scaling the platform to I Corps presents a significantly more complex operational challenge, given the wide geographic dispersion of forces across the Indo-Pacific region. Units operating thousands of kilometers apart will use the software foundation to support real-time decision-making and data sharing, even when communications with higher headquarters are disrupted or entirely unavailable.
Strategically, the program reflects the Army’s broader shift toward open-architecture software solutions and away from monolithic, single-vendor hardware systems. By separating the core data layer from individual combat applications, the Army retains the flexibility to rapidly integrate new third-party capabilities and commercial artificial intelligence tools without having to rebuild the entire command-and-control system.