Anduril ain’t stopping. This morning, the defense tech darling announced yet another contract with the DoD—this time, they locked in an $86M three-year award to help US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) develop and deploy software to manage its autonomous systems.
Anduril will provide USSOCOM with its ready-made AI-powered Lattice mission autonomy software, which the command will use as the foundation of its own autonomy management infrastructure. Once complete, the system will allow special operations forces to coordinate and control a wide range of uncrewed systems from a single control point.
Anduril will also act as the project’s Mission Autonomy Systems Integration Partner (SIP).
More than drones: You might think of Anduril as the hardware powerhouse behind drones, rockets, and sentry towers, but Lattice has actually been the core of its product offering since the company launched in 2017.
The AI-powered software is the engine that makes Anduril systems—and any systems working alongside them—run. Lattice:
- Ingests data from lots of different sensors and sources, then fuses them into a single common operating picture.
- Allows operators to control swarms of drones.
- Uses AI/ML to aid targeting and decision-making.
- Works with both Anduril and other companies’ hardware and software.
Lattice is used across the US government, from US Customs and Border Protection, to CENTCOM, to the Air Force. Last December, the DoD’s Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) awarded Anduril a $100M award to “scale its edge data integration capabilities” with the software.
Anduril has also provided USSOCOM with hardware and software for its counter-unmanned systems (CUxS) program since 2022.
Scale-up: This new award effectively puts Anduril in charge of helping USSOCOM build out comprehensive, multi-domain command and control for all of its autonomous systems.
As USSOCOM’s integration partner, Anduril will:
- Help integrate, test, validate, and deploy both government-owned and commercial software for special operations forces.
- Integrate these different systems into Lattice.
- Oversee demonstrations of this new Lattice-based USSOCOM mission autonomy software in the coming months to prove viability before it’s operationally deployed.
The bottom line: Anduril Industries has been awarded nearly $2B in government contracts, according to data collected by Obviant, and is (reportedly) valued at $28B.