MARCUS WEISGERBER
Defense startup Anduril Industries is pitching a deployable air operations center to the Air Force and the Marine Corps as the software company continues to expand its line of military products.
The mobile command center, called Menace, can fit inside an Air Force C-130 cargo plane, allowing it to be carried to austere locations around the world. Once there, small teams could oversee air tactical operations nearby or even serve as a backup for brick-and-mortar regional command centers, company executives said.
Anduril has been in discussions with senior military officials about its technology, and will show off the new command center at the Air and Space Force Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber conference next week, Zachary Mears, Anduril’s head of strategy and growth, said Wednesday. The company eventually hopes to demo the command center during a military exercise.
The Air Force runs large command centers that oversee air operations in different regions of the world. Some are on other continents while others are in the United States. In recent months, the Air Force has experimented with deployable operations centers called Tactical Operations Center—Light.
“The experiment was designed to provide an initial assessment of the functions and manning required to meet combatant commander needs for a rapidly mobile and configurable tactical command and control node to accelerate the kill chain,” the Air Force said.
Anduril is billing Menace as a “a first-of-its-kind integrated, expeditionary, secure, command, control, communications and computing platform, giving warfighters the ability to rapidly plan and execute missions at geographically dispersed and austere locations,” a press release states. It can be up and running within 10 minutes of being unloaded from the plane,
This week, Anduril showed two reporters pictures of the different versions of the command center, the largest being installed in a shipping container and smaller versions inside armored and tactical vehicles.
The company sees its operations centers fitting within the military’s framework to connect all of its disparate command-and-control hardware and software known as joint all-domain command and control, or JADC2.
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