CDAO Awards Anduril Production Agreement to Deliver Edge Data Mesh

The U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) has awarded Anduril Industries a three-year production agreement to scale a first of its kind tactical Edge Data Mesh, powered by Anduril’s Lattice Mesh. The mesh is already operational across multiple services and combatant commands, delivering critical data that enables mission-relevant generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions specifically tailored to the unique requirements of the warfighter. This agreement will accelerate the expansion of the mesh to increase access to decentralized, distributed and disconnected systems, and to power new insights and real-time decision making at the edge.

Today’s systems may be dependent on cloud or hub/spoke connectivity and are not always optimized for operations with denied, degraded, or intermittent communication pathways. This demands a scalable decentralized solution that dynamically adapts to disruptions. The Lattice Mesh is a decentralized networking capability that seamlessly distributes critical data across platforms, domains, and partners by intelligently prioritizing data paths to ensure the most efficient flow of critical data. To achieve this outcome, the Lattice Mesh was built for the edge, connects directly with, and runs on, sensors, weapons, platforms, robots, and more across the edge to provide access to systems and data not previously accessible. Warfighters at the edge will be enabled to publish and subscribe to data in support of time sensitive operations or where large numbers of manned, unmanned and autonomous systems must collaborate in contested environments to advance the mission.

Years of iterative development and prototyping in multiple combatant commands produced a resilient, secure, and scalable infrastructure that ensures warfighters and weapons systems have access to real-time, actionable data across all domains. During this effort, CDAO determined that the Anduril Lattice Mesh could support joint operations, providing data transformation, access, persistence, and transport, linking the strategic level of war to the tactical edge. Anduril has delivered data integrations to sites around the world, and worked with end users to deeply understand and build a production-quality mesh. The extensibility of this system allows Anduril and CDAO to add integrations to support command and control of autonomous systems and counter-autonomous systems. For example, the Anduril Lattice Mesh™ can be used to connect sensors and effects for multiple missions, including long-range fires and integrated air defense, it can integrate third-party uncrewed systems into autonomous battle networks, and it can integrate deployed sensors and weapons to achieve time-sensitive targeting.

Core to this effort is Anduril’s commitment to interoperability and support of Open DAGIR principles, the CDAO’s approach to scaling data, analytics, and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. The Edge Data Mesh is open and integrates government and vendor-owned data and systems through Anduril’s Lattice™ software development kit (SDK) and open APIs. This allows partners to connect, share, and act on data within the mesh, to include partner-developed, generative AI capabilities at the edge. The mesh’s open architecture allows services, combatant commands, as well as allies and partners to seamlessly collaborate across all domains. Any service or combatant command can leverage this production agreement to extend and modernize existing systems furthering joint, all domain operations.

This production agreement between Anduril and CDAO is a powerful step toward a new era of defense innovation and connected warfare. Scaling this tactical data mesh will accelerate the development of modern kill chains for every weapons system, in every service, and proliferate digital mass across every combatant command.