Lockheed industry team to prototype integrated data layer for Army NGC2

WASHINGTON — The Army has awarded an industry team from Lockheed Martin a $26 million Other Transaction Authority (OTA) to provide an integrated data layer as part of the service’s Next Generation Command and Control initiative, according an Army announcement today.

“Next Generation Command and Control is about accelerating transformation and optimizing the innovation of both industry and our warfighters to deliver critical Warfighting capabilities at speed,” Jesse Tolleson, acting assistant secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics and Technology, said in a press release. “This is not business as usual and reflects exactly what we are trying to achieve through transformation across the Army and the acquisition community.”

The OTA awarded to Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems and its team of non-traditional innovators and commercial technology providers seeks to deliver the integrated data layer to 25th Infantry Division, while not exceeding a 16-month period of performance.

NGC2 is the service’s number one modernization priority and is meant to provide commanders and units a new approach to manage information, data, and command and control with agile and software-based architectures. Previously, warfighting functions such as intelligence and fires, among many, were siloed with their own bespoke systems that did not communicate with each other. This created redundancy and interoperability concerns, ultimately preventing situational awareness on the battlefield for commanders.

The Army developed a horizontal operational design for NGC2 involving a technology stack that goes from a transport layer to an integration layer to a data layer to an application layer, which is where soldiers interact with it. That application layer is also where the Army has broken down the silos of individual warfighting functions into applications that ride on the same backbone that is all integrated together.

This award follows the July announcement of a nearly $100 million award to Anduril and its team to provide a prototype to 4th Infantry Division to scale the capability to the division level to include all enabling units.

In March, the Army tested a previous NGC2 prototype, which service officials dubbed a proof of principle, with an armored battalion and higher headquarters.

“This isn’t the end of competition, this is the beginning. Through these two industry team lead agreements, we’ll evaluate different models for shared responsibility and aligned incentives during the NGC2 prototyping phase,” Joseph Welch, deputy to the commanding general, Army Futures Command, said in today’s announcement. “We don’t want to have great capabilities simply at the start — we want a durable partnership model that keeps pace with an ever-evolving American tech sector and creates continual opportunity to find and insert the best technology solutions.

“By encouraging companies to self-organize and team with each other and enabling them to integrate and solve these problems directly with the operational force, we will be able to rapidly and continuously improve the command and control capabilities we deliver to Soldiers,” he said.

The new OTA was awarded through a commercial solutions offering (CSO) for NGC2 by the program executive office for command, control, communications and networks.

Adjacent to the prototyping effort with 4th ID and other units, PEO C3N is continuing to work with vendors for new capabilities in the future.

The CSOs as part of NGC2 are where companies can continue to submit white papers based on capabilities that could be just for small slices of NGC2, such as transport, or it could be the entire stack..

The intent is to be able to onboard new capabilities and vendors if they have a viable solution that works better than what currently exists. Officials have maintained from NGC2’s inception that they want flexibility to onboard and offboard contractors and capabilities, especially if companies are not performing. This is a significant departure from previous programs in which the government was locked into a particular vendor for a period of time, in some cases.

The Army is continuing to accept proposals under the CSO for potential future team lead or component integration in the NGC2 technology stack, the service said.

The integrated data layer team Lockheed will be working on will enable the Army to assess NGC2 software options. Those software options will be supported by command and control Fix transport and infrastructure capabilities.

C2 Fix was initially conceived as essentially a bridge between legacy capabilities and NGC2. As the Army was developing the concept for NGC2, it needed to outfit units with better equipment, dubbed “fight tonight” capabilities in the event of a contingency.

That involved using current capabilities — along with a few newer commercial solutions — differently. Now officials refer to C2 Fix as buying down the risk to NGC2.

Officials told Breaking Defense to think of the 4th ID and 25th ID as parallel activities with slightly different approaches to take the best out of both regarding NGC2 prototyping. They’ve also maintained that some capabilities and architectures, such as transport, with C2 Fix are going to carry over and be able to support NGC2.