Anduril is best known for supplying surveillance towers and software used to watch over the US-Mexico border and some US bases. Now, it is retooling the software behind that tech, Lattice, to connect military equipment from ground radar to fighter jets. The idea is to provide service members a single place to take in, and act on, information from disparate systems more usually connected by people talking over radio or phone, with help from artificial intelligence. Think of it as an operating system for war.
This is a good time to be pitching that kind of thing to the Pentagon. For the past five years, top military brass and successive secretaries of defense have coveted the tech industry’s software skills and tried to lure companies more aligned with Silicon Valley than the Capital Beltway.
… That would bode well for vendors like Anduril and Immersive Wisdom, but it’s not clear the Air Force will get all the funding it wants. The ABMS program is also a test of whether small contracts with tech companies can be scaled up into a multibillion-dollar program like those the Pentagon is built on. “The jury is still out,” says Eric Lofgren, a research fellow at George Mason’s Center for Government Contracting.
The Air Force’s recent exercises showed how taking a modular approach can allow more agile development, Lofgren says. But the program got a frosty reception from Congress and the Government Accountability Office earlier this year, in part because it’s not easy to assess under rules designed for big contracts awarded to a single company. For Anduril and others to disrupt defense tech, it seems, there will need to be bureaucratic as well as technological breakthroughs.
That was from a nice Wired article, “Behind Anduril’s Effort to Create an Operating System for War.” If ABMS gets $3.2B through the FYDP as planned, or even more than that, then it could be a jumping off point for the successful new entrants to branch into all other Air Force and potentially Army/Navy program offices. I think the ball is rolling and it will get most of what it asked for in FY21. But I’m sure the plan is to ask for more through the FYDP in FY22 as capabilities are demonstrated and more hype gets behind it — and then more in FY23. For that to kind of growth to happen, I think the criteria for oversight used by OSD, OMB, GAO, and Congress will have to change.
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