Latest news with #NGC2
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Inside the US Army's C2 upgrade – what industry can expect
Within the Army Transformation Initiative, the Army's Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) effort represents a fundamental change in delivering data-driven C2 to our formations. From requirements to resourcing, acquisition and contracting, every gear in the system is being rebuilt to drive smarter, faster, and more effective outcomes. The scope and pace of this change is creating both opportunities and questions as industry adapts with us. We're delivering seamlessly integrated C2 capability from corps down to squad. The key is a data integration layer that enables a rapid buildout of applications across warfighting functions such as fires, intelligence, logistics, and protection, and provides a common operating picture across all. The integrated data layer is the foundation for multifunctional artificial intelligence-enabled models that will rapidly augment decision making and speed. Commercial hardware and software is critical to achieving the NGC2 vision. The Army's tech refresh cycles for C2-enabling components lag their commercial equivalents, leading to persistent obsolescence. To overcome this we must buy truly commercial technology – not commercially-modified 'Franken-products' that make us a unique customer and take us off the path of affordability and innovation. The Army's current C2 capabilities are largely provided through individual efforts: separate requirements documents, funding lines, contracts, and acquisition programs, tied together through top-down driven architectures with pre-determined information exchanges. The isolation and rigidity of this model has largely failed to deliver adaptable or integrated capability to the field. NGC2's solution is to establish a core program that sets the foundations for an emergent technical architecture, with other ecosystem programs built around it. The NGC2 technology stack consists of a set of layers for network, computing, data, and applications, powered by commercially-driven open interfaces and common services. NGC2 also simplifies requirements via a four-page 'Characteristics of Need' that describes the problem instead of dictating the solution. Similarly, the Army is consolidating a multitude of C2-related funding lines into a combined NGC2 capability portfolio, enabling the rapid re-direction of resources as the program evolves. The Army will initially contract with two or more industry team leads who are accountable for the performance of the core program as well as the entire ecosystem. It differs from the standard systems integrator model in several ways: The Army encourages non-exclusive teams, freeing up component providers to partner across different leads; the Army will directly engage on technical, financial and contractual matters with the individual companies that are members of the industry teams, not just the team leads; the Army will minimize the amount of government-furnished information and equipment that will be directed outright; the Army will identify public-private partnerships or similar mechanisms to ensure that we maintain technical currency on NGC2 implementations, resulting in lower risk and switching costs; the Army will not cede its role as an informed buyer to technical assistance consultants who are paid by the hours they spend instead of the outcomes they drive. The Army prefers industry self-organization in identifying complimentary NGC2 solutions. However, these solutions do not all need to be provided under the team lead contract, nor under the core NGC2 program. The Army may separately contract for a component capability, or even manage it as an individual acquisition program. But in every case, the Army will discuss components with the team leads to ensure they work together with the NGC2 architecture. Vendors may bid as a team lead or serve as a component provider (or both). Vendors interested in the latter can do so through business-to-business partnership with a team lead, or directly through the Army under an associated contract agreement that connects them to a team lead. As the architecture matures, vendors can also build to the open interfaces in the NGC2 design. This will enable rapid development and procurement of applications and AI models, for example, without a direct or government-brokered relationship with any team lead. There is inherent tension between ongoing competition and the funding assurance that comes from winning contracts. To balance this, the Army intends to maintain a continuous open solicitation to enable the introduction of new capability at any time, while also advertising specific 'windows' for decision points. For example, following the current round of competition, the next window may be after the first Corps Headquarters and two Divisions are fielded. Key concepts in contracting for NGC2 capability will include fixed price and outcome-driven efforts, common sense price reasonableness determinations, and 'as a service' models for use and consumption – both for hardware and software. The Army must evolve and adapt, and its C2 systems are critical to this transformation. By simultaneously transforming Army institutional processes for requirements, resourcing, acquisition and contracting, the comprehensive strategy described here will clear a path toward this vision. Joseph Welch is the deputy to the commanding general of Army Futures Command.
Globe and Mail
07-04-2025
- Business
- Globe and Mail
This Analyst Is Calling for ‘Near Term' Upside in Palantir Stock Despite the Tariffs Selloff
Palantir (PLTR) stock has been rattled in recent weeks as tariffs drive fears of a recession and continue to weigh on U.S. tech stocks. Plus, investors are concerned that federal spending cuts could hurt PLTR's business as well. But a William Blair analyst recommends buying Palantir stock on recent weakness since it's positioned for significant upside in the near term. PLTR shares are currently down more than 35% versus their year-to-date high set in mid-February. Why Is William Blair Bullish on Palantir Stock? President Donald Trump's administration has recently directed the Pentagon to reallocate about $50 billion to advanced military technologies, including drones. According to William Blair analyst Louie DiPalma, that could prove to be a tailwind for Palantir as its software is what powers those military technologies. DiPalma favors investing in PLTR also because the U.S. Army could soon announce a new contract for its Next-Generation Command and Control (NGC2) program. Additionally, the Army has recently indicated plans of continuing with the existing Army Vantage platform, which is powered by Palantir. Put together, these developments suggest the PLTR share price could rip higher in coming weeks, DiPalma argued in a recent note. PLTR Doesn't Have Revenue Exposure to China DiPalma recommends buying Palantir stock amidst ongoing volatility also because it hardly has any revenue exposure to China. Beijing has already announced a 34% retaliatory tariff on American products. But that doesn't mean much for PLTR as more than half of its revenue comes from the U.S. Palantir has historically avoided doing business with China due to data privacy and security concerns. That's why the company's management offered better-than-expected guidance in February. Palantir sees its revenue coming in at $3.75 billion this year – well ahead of $3.52 billion that experts had forecast. Wall Street Is Cautiously Positive on Palantir Despite macroeconomic challenges and an uncertain environment, other analysts seem to agree with Louie DiPalma on Palantir stock. The mean target on PLTR shares currently sits at about $84. While that doesn't suggest a swift recovery for shares to their peak in mid-February, the price target, nonetheless, indicates potential for about a 10% gain from current levels.
Yahoo
01-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
US Army punches the gas on Next-Gen Command-and-Control
Coming out of an entire career in the operational Army, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ellis, now the director of the Army's command-and-control modernization, said it hasn't been uncommon in the field to see critical data jotted down on a piece of cardboard in the back of a platoon sergeant's tank. 'There's probably a headquarter somewhere today at an exercise where an intel officer is going to write everything down on a piece of sticky note that came out of his intel system, walk across the [Tactical Operations Center], hand it over to the fires guy who has to type it into the fires system to make it work,' he said in a Monday press briefing at the Pentagon. 'We realize this is just not the approach to speed that we need in the United States Army.' The Army's command-and-control, or C2, architecture, which enables commanders to plan, decide and executive missions, was cobbled together over 20 years during the Global War on Terror. Most warfighting functions used separate stove-piped systems, amounting to a total of 17 programs of record, according to Alex Miller, the Army's chief technology officer. 'We had built up a lot of technical debt and process debt,' Miller said during the briefing. 'As technology evolved and as commercial industry really got into the edge processing game and data analytics and cloud, we had processes in place that didn't allow us to change fast,' Miller said, calling it '60 years of policy archeology.' Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George recognized getting command-and-control right was imperative to future battlefield success and decided to embark on a program to fix the service's C2 capabilities to avoid operational disruption while creating the necessary clean-sheet system from scratch. The Army's effort to overhaul its command-and-control ecosystem, dubbed Next-Generation C2, is one of the top priorities for Army modernization — if not the highest. 'If you cannot command and control your formation, nothing else matters,' Army Futures Command commander, Gen. James Rainey said last week at the Association of the U.S. Army's Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. A year ago at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, soldiers at the Army's experimentation event Project Convergence and industry partners, including Google, Anduril and Palantir, demonstrated a proof-of-concept at the unclassified level for what a Next-Generation C2 system, or NGC2, might look like. Walking through a cluster of adobe buildings and pitched tents in a quiet desert village in the middle of the Mojave Desert, George saw commanders and unit leaders using just a laptop or tablet and headset to communicate, plan, conduct reconnaissance and targeting and execute fires operations. Using just their vehicles as operations centers, the units decreased both their signature in the electromagnetic spectrum and Tactical Operations Centers footprints, which typically stick out like sore thumbs, and planned and executed their missions more efficiently. Then the service took the capability to another experimentation exercise called NetModX in September. 'We took that commercial architecture, the software side of that, the data flow inside of that, put it on real Army systems, on the real radios that we have or might want, satellites, all that. Ran that system, jammed them, knocked people off of it, tested it,' Ellis said. Fast-forward to Project Convergence, held earlier this spring at the National Training Center. There, the Army gave the capability to an entire armored battalion, put it in a brigade headquarters and had real soldiers employing the technology. 'There wasn't an Army of contractors following vehicles around,' Ellis noted. 'The soldiers were actually using a lot, really quality feedback there. For instance, Ellis said that he climbed on top of a tank for 45 minutes talking to soldiers using NGC2. They showed how they could flip through intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance feeds, examine vehicle maintenance data and supplies status and make better decisions in real time. 'Climbing off that tank I realized we hadn't once talked about how complicated it was to access that data, how hard it was to log in, the transport problems they were having,' Ellis said. 'We were talking about what they're actually doing with the data, which is exactly what our goal is.' The Army took one year to go from a proof-of-concept to capability validation, a timeline Miller called 'astronomically fast.' Normally, such a process would take five to seven years, he said. 'We went from characterization of need with industry, government and industry together, to things in the hands of soldiers that I am actually pretty confident that if war broke out tonight, they could use in real-time.' The Army has now enabled a process through a software acquisition strategy to try and buy commercially available technology more agilely. The service has also moved away from giving industry a set of rigid requirements to adhere to when developing a capability to, instead, provide them with a problem and a short, broad statement outlining the Army's needs. Industry has already helped significantly to shape the effort. 'We're not just talking about stovepipes anymore,' Ellis said, 'We're actually talking about how to approach it from a whole stack, everything from software, the applications, all the way down to the data transport layer.' A major part of the effort is developing an integrated data layer on which the service can build applications over the top, according to Ellis. Like applications on smartphones, the Army's systems can use that same data. Rather than relying on 'complicated spaghetti charts' to flow data, an integrated data layer puts data all in one place, Ellis said. The service will soon release a request to industry for solutions that will filter into its brand new, clean-sheet approach to Next-Gen C2 to build on the progress made over the last year and begin to scale the capability across the operational force, Lt. Gen. Rob Collins, the military deputy to the Army's acquisition chief, said. The Army will never stop iterating its C2 capability going forward and will rely heavily on soldier feedback to build the system, he noted. The major endeavor also presents an opportunity for the service to work differently with industry, Joe Welch, the deputy to the Army Futures Command commander, said during Monday's media briefing. 'We're moving away from this concept of an industry integrator into more of a team of teams, but on our side, we need to be a better customer. It's not just handing industry a problem statement and then walking away, waiting for them to deliver and then holding them accountable if they don't,' Welch said. 'That partnership means that we need to understand where we have shared incentives, where we have different incentives and then kind of acknowledging those directly and understanding how to work through that.' The Army plans to scale the system to an entire division by the next iteration of Project Convergence, expected to take place in the summer of 2026. The Army chief has charted the developers to field to both a division and corps. While the service typically takes about five years to field a capability to the entire Army, Miller said once the first division gets the core software and data pieces that will be cloud-based, multiple divisions will be able to log in at the same time. The Army also plans to use funding freed up by ending legacy capabilities to pay for Next-Gen C2 to the tune of 'billions of dollars,' Welch said. 'There's no room for things that won't win,' Miller said. 'Being able to stop and adjust and use the money that taxpayers gave us more efficiently, that's the name of the game. That's how we're going to pay for Next-Gen C2.'
