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WASHINGTON — As the US military embraces artificial intelligence and big data, the Pentagon is trying to wean itself from reliance on centralized mega-systems and instead empower frontline leaders at the “tactical edge.”
That’s why, last week, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital & AI Office (CDAO) awarded startup defense firm Anduril a $100 million, three-year contract to expand its Lattice Mesh. Lattice is a system that lets frontline forces rapidly access data from over a hundred different types of sensors — for example, to track incoming hostile drones — over existing tactical networks, without having to first relay that data through central processing hubs.
Then, this week, Anduril released a Lattice Software Development Kit (SDK) that will allow other companies to build their own applications to run on Lattice Mesh, without having to get permission from Anduril. The company announced an initial list of 10 partners, ranging from startups like Apex (space systems) and Saronic (unmanned boats) to giants like Oracle and Textron. But in the future, an Anduril executive told Breaking Defense, any company can access the kit and write software for Lattice.
“We want to remove Anduril as any form of bottleneck … and allow anyone to be publishing [apps and data] to the Lattice Mesh,” said senior VP Thomas Keane. “What the SDK allows is now for third parties to do it without relying on Anduril.”
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It’s a decentralized business model for a decentralized military system. It’s also a departure from traditional practice for both the defense industry and the Defense Department, which historically favor centralized mega-projects where a single lead contractor can achieve “vendor lock” and keep competitors out for decades. But the recent Lattice Mesh announcements suggest the rise of a more open, flexible and adaptable approach.
“If we know anything about the future, it’s that we don’t know that much about the future,” said CDAO Principal Deputy Margaret Palmieri. “Technology is changing really fast, the mission space is changing really fast, and the combinations of capabilities that we need to bring together … require the Department to be much more agile than in the past.”
In such an unpredictable world, Palmieri said, military programs must be able to bring on new capabilities quickly from whoever can provide the best tech in the least time. (CDAO’s acquisition model for this approach is formally called Open DAGIR). Releasing the SDK makes that adaptability possible for Lattice.
“We can use the data mesh back end that Anduril has, but we don’t only have to rely on Anduril apps,” she told Breaking Defense. “We can now invite other third-party app developers in from anywhere in the ecosystem that is our incredible advantage as a as a nation.”
What’s in it for Anduril? While Keane didn’t say so outright, the firm is clearly betting that an open door on Lattice Mesh is good for business, much as Apple benefits from letting third parties develop applications for their iPhones: More third-party options make the underlying product more useful, so it sells better.
The C-3PO Approach
Specifically, what makes Lattice useful to the military is that it lets frontline units access (or “subscribe to”) data feeds from a host of different sensors, Keane and Palmieri explained. Those sensors are operated by many different organizations, communicate over different networks, and use different, incompatible formats; so, historically, the intelligence they gather has to be sent back to a central hub for processing before it can be widely shared. But that process takes precious time that forces in combat may not have. It relies on long-range transmissions, communications satellites and other relays that a sophisticated adversary could jam or destroy.
By contrast, Lattice Mesh gives a frontline unit its own digital “translator” to talk to different sensors directly. It’s a bit like the golden droid C-3PO in Star Wars, “fluent in over six million forms of communication.” That allows data sharing “on the edge,” with many units talking to many sensors, without the delays and vulnerabilities of a centralized hub-and-spoke system.
Today, after several years of closed-door experimentation with CDAO and limited deployments at operational Combatant Commands, Lattice Mesh now has translator algorithms for more than a hundred different types of sensors, Keane said, “and we are adding new ‘languages’ every week.”
But by releasing the Lattice SDK to third parties, he went on, Anduril lets other companies — drone makers, satellite operators, sensor manufacturers and more — build their own translators for their own products. The more companies do that, the more types of sensors the military can use Lattice for.
This open-door, decentralized approach is not unique to Lattice Mesh. Indeed, Lattice is just one of several pieces of the military’s evolving capability to share intelligence and transmit orders across US and allied forces on land, sea, air, space, and cyberspace — known as Combined Joint All-Domain Command & Control (CJADC2).
Over time, the military has backed off from one-size-fits-all approaches to CJADC2. Instead of imposing a single universal data standard and a single mega-network, it’s moving towards a “federated” approach that allows different systems for different niches but tries to make them all compatible.
That wasn’t obvious from the start, Palmieri emphasized. “When we started off in January of 2023, we thought … we could find one capability that would do all those things,” she told Breaking Defense. But through a series of quarterly Global Information Dominance Experiments, “what we realized was that there wasn’t a single data integration layer that you could select as best of breed across all those organizations and missions … What you needed at the strategic and operational level for data integration was different than what we needed at a tactical level.”
When CDAO released the initial operational toolkit for CJADC2 — officially called the “Minimum Viable Capability” and publicly announced in February — it focused on strategic coordination at the four-star Combatant Commands. But data-sharing tools for headquarters staff aren’t suitable for combat units, Palmieri said. Headquarters need huge amounts of information to produce detailed plans in hours or days; frontline commanders need much smaller volumes of data, but they need it right now.
That second niche is where Lattice Mesh came in. “The data mesh capability is not the answer for everything,” Palmieri said. “What we found with the data mesh that Anduril provided was it was really good at that low-latency data exchange.”
“What CDAO asked us for is the ability to use this data in near real-time decisions at the edge,” Keane said. “We measure time in seconds, not in hours or days.”
