The Army aims to select a contractor that can deliver two prototype UAVs for what it is calling the Army Blood Link project, the notice states. Each drone must be capable of transporting 20 units of blood products.

The deadline to respond to the notice is Sept. 21, and the drones will need to be delivered within three months of the contract award.

“Due to the compressed timeline, we recommend focusing on further development and adaptation of existing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) UAS solutions,” the notice emphasized.

The request for proposals, issued on behalf of the XVIII Airborne Corps Joint Operations Innovation Outpost, calls for a UAV that can haul a minimum of 35 pounds and up to 50 pounds. The drone should have a one-way transport radius of 30 kilometers and a maximum range of 100 kilometers, the notice states.

Maximum speed was not specified in the request, but the Army wants a UAV capable of flying at an altitude of up to 18,000 feet. The request notes that the UAV should also be capable of a “maximum 30-minute response time from mission request to launch under standard operating conditions.”

Given the perishability of blood supplies, the drone must carefully regulate its operating temperature, the Army requested. The cargo container should “maintain required temperature for up to [three] hours of transport time, within an ambient environment of 15°F to 120°F with high humidity,” the notice states.

The Army estimates a total mission duration of three to six hours, with blood carried within temperature limits for no more than three hours.

The request also details that the container must accommodate blood bags roughly 8 inches long and 5 inches wide. The cargo bay should also be resistant to vibration, rain, sand, chemical contamination and other environmental hazards.

Upon delivery, the drone will need to precisely land a cargo within 10 meters of the desired location, according to the request.

Potentially dropping of the blood supplies from the air is also possible, the notice states. This would mean a “drop capability from 10 to 15 meters above ground level with landing accuracy sufficient to remain within the 10-meter delivery-location requirement and not damage the blood products or compromise container integrity,” the request notes.

The Army envisions a semi-autonomous drone with “autonomous waypoint navigation and return-to-base functions, under operator supervision.” The service wants the UAV and its ground equipment to also have an operational lifespan of 500 to 1,500 flight hours.

The Army has been devoting more attention to the challenge of delivering blood supplies to the front lines. In May 2025, the 173rd Airborne Brigade used drones to transport blood during the Swift Response exercise in Lithuania.

The concern, critics say, is not limited to weapons that can select and engage targets on their own.

At the hearing, titled “Artificial Intelligence in the Military Domain: Implications for Human Rights,” witnesses told members of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission that AI can influence human decisions leading to a strike while leaving the individual formally responsible for the final call.

“The approval button alone does not demonstrate the control,” Anna Mysyshyn, a Ukrainian AI-governance researcher, told lawmakers.

The issue comes as the Pentagon pushes to use AI to accelerate military decision-making. The Pentagon’s 2023 AI adoption strategy identified “fast, precise and resilient kill chains” as a desired outcome, while its 2026 AI strategy calls for becoming an “AI-first” warfighting force by redesigning military workflows and operational concepts around current AI capabilities.

Mysyshyn questioned whether a person supervising multiple AI-enabled systems can recognize an incorrect recommendation and intervene fast enough before harm occurs. She cited Ukraine as an example of AI compressing decisions from hours to minutes.

In many scenarios, a human making the final decision does not necessarily have enough information, time or the ability to challenge the system’s recommendation, she said.

The Defense Department’s 2023 directive on autonomy in weapon systems requires autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.

Wednesday’s testimony focused on a broader question: whether that judgment remains meaningful if AI is influencing targeting faster than a human can authenticate.

Amanda Klasing, national director of government relations and advocacy at Amnesty International USA, warned that AI can compress the military “kill chain” in ways that make it difficult to determine whether meaningful human discernment actually occurred before a strike.

Joseph Chapa, a former military officer and scholar of military ethics, argued that the debate should not focus solely on how autonomous a system is. He urged policymakers to consider whether an AI system relies on statistical inference, what happens when it fails in a particular operational environment and whether its decisions can be audited afterward.

Statistical AI systems can fail differently from traditional software, Chapa said, including producing substantially different outputs from relatively small changes in inputs. More complex systems can also make it difficult to reconstruct how a particular recommendation was produced after the fact.

He called for greater AI education across the military, including specialized training for personnel working with targeting and intelligence systems.

Witnesses on Wednesday also pointed to a larger accountability problem: determining what happens when an AI-assisted decision results in civilian harm.

The Defense Department established its Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan in 2022, including a Civilian Protection Center of Excellence intended to serve as a hub for analysis and training. Federal law requires the Pentagon to operate the center.

But a Defense Department inspector general review released in May assessed the department’s implementation of the civilian-harm framework and found problems including the loss or reassignment of personnel, the end of funding for a civilian-harm data-management platform and the failure of a senior steering committee to continue meeting.

That matters in the case of AI because, as Klasing noted, the military currently has limited ability to determine whether AI may contribute to improper targeting of civilians.

On the first day of the U.S.-Iran war, a Tomahawk cruise missile struck Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed — more than 100 of them under the age of 12, according to UN and Iranian officials.

The school building sat fewer than 100 yards from a long-time Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps naval installation and was previously located within the IRGC compound perimeter until a wall appeared between 2013 and 2016, according to an analysis of satellite imagery by Amnesty International.

By the time the U.S. and Israel launched their first strikes on Feb. 28, the school had been established several years prior. It was active on social media and had its own website, a Reuters investigation found.

More than 120 House Democrats sent a letter to the Pentagon on March 12, demanding clarity on whether artificial intelligence, “including the use of the Maven Smart System, [was] used to identify the Shajareh Tayyebeh school as a target.”

U.S. military investigators in the wake of the incident stated that the strike was likely carried out by U.S. forces. The Pentagon, however, has still not released its investigative findings.

Klasing proposed adding information about AI involvement to the Pentagon’s annual civilian-casualty reports required under Section 1057 of the National Defense Authorization Act. The existing reporting requirement calls for information about civilian casualty mitigation efforts and investigations, but does not specifically require the department to identify whether AI contributed to an incident.

Steve Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Pentagon should collect data from military operations and conduct after-action reviews to determine whether AI-assisted systems accurately identified intended targets and whether errors contributed to civilian casualties.

“A bigger question is to what extent is the Pentagon collecting data and verifying the target accuracy of all these 1000s of strikes?” Feldstein said.

Feldstein also cautioned against treating AI itself as the source of every potential problem. AI can be used to help verify intelligence, detect changes in imagery and prioritize defensive responses to threats such as drones and ballistic missiles.

But if a human-influenced system is built around assumptions that certain demographic traits make someone a lawful target, Mysyshyn said, AI would not correct that underlying premise.

Feldstein similarly pointed to the rules humans establish before an AI system is used. If commanders determine that a particular level of civilian harm is acceptable in pursuit of a military objective, he said, the machine is operating within a human-defined framework.

The challenge is particularly acute when systems operate faster than people can meaningfully assess recommendations.

The commission opened Wednesday’s hearing with an example from Iraq. In 2004, Army squad leader Nick Ellison encountered two young men firing a machine gun from a car during a census patrol in Kirkuk.

Ellison made eye contact with one of the men, saw panic and ordered his soldiers to hold fire. The men turned out to be brothers of a newly married groom, and the gunfire was celebratory.

Mysyshyn said testing should examine bias, reliability, civilian protection, realistic time pressure, whether operators can interrupt systems and whether decisions can be traced throughout an AI system’s lifecycle.

Chapa said some AI systems may be difficult to audit after the fact, while Deborah Brown of Human Rights Watch said information about military AI use has often emerged through investigative reporting and whistleblowers rather than government disclosures.

The growing challenge, according to witnesses, is no longer making a machine pull a trigger, but whether the human who approves the trigger pull has enough time, information and authority to make a meaningful choice before disaster.

Military Times reporter Katie Livingstone contributed to this report.

The force needs to be “clear-eyed” about the environment ahead as future conflicts will be progressively contested and defy simpler solutions, Caine said in a Wednesday keynote at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference.

“We have to assume from now on that our formations will be hunted by autonomous systems, jammed across the spectrum and tracked in real time,” Caine said in his speech.

“We have to transition the joint force to be prepared to fight and win our future wars by generating and delivering lethality at scale with an agile, optimized, high-low mix of combat capabilities to give the young members of the 2.8 million-member all-volunteer joint force the tools that they need before they need them,” he continued.

While calling the American military and their families the country’s “ultimate insurance policy,” Caine asserted that the joint force needs to be ready for a fight before it begins.

Even as the country’s adversaries are geographically dispersed, they are connected through sharing technology, intelligence, weapons and economic support, he said. As the military branches study past and present American battlefields, they are looking for new ways to challenge the advantage, demonstrating the necessity for readiness and investment in a range of military capabilities before a crisis begins.

Recently, Russia and Iran have deepened their military partnership with a technological feedback loop amid the Ukraine war and the conflict in the Middle East. Moscow is sending Iran upgraded munitions, satellite imagery and targeting data that have been used against American forces in the Middle East.

Tehran first supplied Russia with Shahed attack drones for use in Ukraine in 2022 and has since arranged a license to build the Iranian-designed drones on Russian territory.

“The character of war is changing, and time is of the essence,” Caine said, emphasizing how the way and speed in which countries fight is altering on the modern battlefield as artificial intelligence, cyber capabilities and autonomous systems develop.

The chairman noted that the modern battlefield today operates from the seabed to the cislunar space, highlighting that the advantage will go to whoever can see, understand, decide and act first as a learning organization.

Caine highlighted the June rescue of two Army soldiers by way of a remotely piloted Navy unmanned surface as an example of how the military is adapting and utilizing AI and autonomous tools.

He also referenced how these tools are being used to change the threat in contested electromagnetic interference environments, such as in Ukraine, with first-person view drones.

“Take it together, these examples from the Strait of Hormuz to the front lines in Ukraine show how quickly technology is changing the character of war,” he said.

Caine spotlighted that it will be young service leaders who will be the ones in charge of the subsequent conflicts in these environments and will have to be adaptive and understanding of their environment with a plethora of information.

As technology, networks and software continue to change, the need for capable and lethal leaders will not, he said. The nation can bring autonomy and better networks to the force but none of it will matter without trusted leaders that can work under pressure.

“We must move together because the window to build the force that we need is closing,” Caine said. “We can buy almost anything in life, but we cannot buy time.”

During the panel, “Rethinking the Stockpile: Building the Right Mix for Future Conflict” at the Air and Space Cyber Conference on Monday, Lyons noted that the service is working to balance “capability, capacity cost and the adaptability to produce at the speed and scale for future conflicts.”

Citing the conflict in Ukraine, where battlefield adaptations can come within hours and minutes, not months and years, panelist Bryon Kroger, founder and CEO of Rise8, noted that “when it comes to software, we’ve just historically been really bad. Like, in some cases, we’re building software slower than hardware. It’s wild.”

“You wouldn’t think about not establishing a refueling apparatus for aircraft that need to get across long distances,” said Kroger. “But we haven’t really thought about, from an enterprise IT perspective, how to create a similar refueling apparatus or the ability to continuously deliver software to the field in the way that you should. It’s not getting nearly enough attention and we need to start.

“We really have to decouple the software cycles from the hardware cycles. … We [need to be] deploying multiple times a day, where we can get an update to the field on demand. As soon as we need it.”

Ryan Hartman, chief executive officer of Ondas Sentinel, agreed.

“Inventory on the first day of the conflict is one important equation. But it is the ability for that inventory to evolve with the conflict. In my 27 years in the industry, I haven’t seen an adversary comply with our acquisition system yet. And therefore, we have to make sure that our acquisition system enables us to keep up with the pace of the conflict and the adaptability necessary to stay relevant in the conflict.”

When addressing how the government and industry can work together to address stockpile bottlenecks, both Hartman and Kroger offered simple, if possibly difficult to enact, solutions.

For Kroger, the biggest bottleneck Rise8 faces is something simple: a calendar.

According to him, “80-85%” of his company’s time is spent waiting on government authorization to operate — time spent “waiting in the queue” to get on the ”authorizing official’s calendar… if it takes six months to get on the ATO’s calendar, right there you’re at a minimum of six months to fill the system, but they’re going to find something because we always find things during test and evaluation. And now we go back, redevelop, and wait another six months to get on that calendar. This is how you get 12–18-month ATO cycles,” he noted.

For Hartman, the bottleneck within U.S. industry is clear: “The first is the supply chain, the second is the supply chain, the third is the supply chain and the fourth is testing.”

With technological advancements unfolding at breakneck speed amid conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, time is not a luxury the U.S. Air Force and its industry partners have much of.

That has been a boon to people like Kroger, who notes that a government that unleashes performance-based outcomes means that the defense industry is not an insider game anymore. Rather, contracts go to companies that offer solutions-based, scalable products.

As for the most important action the government and industries must take to be better positioned in the next few years, Hartman was blunt:

“Make sure we have capacity prior to a conflict.”

The company started a series of promotional videos about building the HICAR since announcing the weapon early last month, saying it wants to highlight the design’s performance and show what “high-speed product development” looks like.

The Naval Surface Warfare Center, which issued the solicitation in May, had a 21-day response period that has ended. The solicitation asked for an M4-style platform capable of firing “future hypervelocity” 5.56mm ammo, which would increase the weapon’s effective range from 300 to 600 meters.

Bill Geissele, the founder and president of Geissele Automatics, explained in an interview with Military Times that they were able to respond to the solicitation so quickly because they were “already well familiar” with the technology.

He said they had been working on other government and commercial projects involving high-pressure ammunition for about three years before the solicitation. The company is currently contracted to make sniper rifles for SOCOM.

Details about the U.S. military’s hypervelocity 5.56mm, designated M855A1+, are non-existent. SOCOM referred Military Times to the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, which described the cartridge in an email as a “conceptual approach for achieving increased range and performance within existing calibers.”

For internal testing and demonstrations, Geissele said they created their own hypervelocity cartridge using commercial products that replicates the military ammunition.

He explained that the major difference between legacy 5.56mm ammo and the hypervelocity round is that the hypervelocity case is loaded to 82,000 PSI, or about 20,000 PSI higher.

However, because of the project’s sensitive nature, Geissele said they won’t sell the civilian variant of the HICAR until the ammo becomes commercially available.

In the promotional videos, Geissele engineers equip the HICAR with a long-range scope to demonstrate the weapon’s range while also measuring the velocity with a chronograph. The company said the HICAR, equipped with an 11.5-inch barrel and shooting pressurized ammo with a 77-grain bullet, will consistently deliver a muzzle velocity of 2,700 feet per second and is accurate out ot 800 meters.

“When you put a high-performance engine into a vehicle that’s not designed for it, other things in the vehicle have to be beefed up in order to handle the horsepower,” he said. “And it’s the same thing with high-pressure ammunition.”

Geissele explained that one challenge with high-pressure ammunition is the stress it puts on the barrel. To address this concern, they used a higher-quality steel — the kind typically reserved for artillery barrels — for the HICAR.

Yet, some unknowns remain about the longevity of a firearm running high-pressure ammunition. “That’s why we’re making the ammunition and testing it,” he said. “We haven’t shot as many rounds through to find a limit of it. We are shooting our first iteration of the barrel now.”

He called the testing process “actually extremely difficult” because they have to fire thousands of rounds and closely monitor not just the performance, but the wear on the materials as well.

Because they haven’t completed testing, the Geissele HICAR has not yet reached its final iteration. Geissele explained that the company is close, but it just has not had an extremely high round count yet.

But that’s also why the company started releasing the videos. “I think it’s interesting to see it. I think it’s very interesting for people to see product development and how Geissele does it. You know, people want to understand what exactly is going on so it’s not a mystery.”

He called their HICAR design a “production-ready weapon” and beyond the prototype phase. “We could, you know, if we got an order for 5,000 guns tomorrow, we could turn the machines on and start making them,” he added.

The Pentagon now wants artificial intelligence that can cut through the confusion.

It’s seeking “AI-based software tools to turn fragmented sensor data into a continuously updated understanding of space and missile threats fast enough to drive operational decisions,” according to the Defense Innovation Unit solicitation, which is due Sept. 24. “Existing tools struggle to distinguish closely spaced objects, track emerging threats, and keep threat models current.”

The project, known as the “Space Threat Intelligence Synthesis Engine,” will leverage AI’s greatest strength: the ability to quickly analyze reams of data. The software will fuse “massive streams of multi-source data, including live video, satellite imagery, radar and sensor feeds, geospatial data, and classified intelligence reports.”

“By automating advanced cross-data correlation, the architecture aims to uncover hidden patterns, complex operational relationships, and predictive threat behaviors far beyond the capabilities of human analysis alone.”

Ultimately, the system should “generate actionable, confidence-scored alerts supporting analyst-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop, or automated workflows.”

The AI will help human operators — and other machines.

It will provide “intuitive, human-readable visualizations for frontline operators and low-latency, machine-to-machine APIs to drive automated command-and-control (C2) workflows.”

DIU is aiming for an open-source system with a latency delay of no more than five seconds — and preferably no more than two seconds — between the arrival of data and the results being displayed. Throughput should be 20 to 30 megabytes per minute, with bursts of up to five gigabytes.

Contractors should demonstrate that their products show “significant speed and accuracy improvements in event detection, characterization, and attribution compared to existing baseline systems.”

As skies fill with missiles and drones in conflicts like the ones with Ukraine and Iran, AI is increasingly being seen as an indispensable partner to overworked human operators. In particular, with a perpetual shortage of expensive interceptors, such as the Patriot air-defense system, operators must quickly decide when and where to allocate them.

Defense contractors and AI firms are teaming up to incorporate AI into missile defense.

For example, Northrop Grumman announced in July that it was partnering with AI firm Camgian to incorporate artificial intelligence into integrated air and missile defense systems. BAE and Scale AI have also teamed up for AI-enhanced missile defense.

Markoff explained that calling in air support was an effective way to clear an area, but with thousands of potential targets and few available weapon systems, he constantly had to calculate whether a particular target was worth it.

“Even if that target wasn’t active, knowing that it might be and maintaining availability of that type of a weapon system on station in case it showed up, that was all math I was doing in my head,” he said, adding, “We had to be really careful about saving those munitions.”

In an interview with Military Times, Markoff, now the co-founder and chief executive of Smack Technologies, said his experience in Mosul illustrates the kind of problem his company’s artificial intelligence software, Omega, is designed to help solve.

Earlier this month, Markoff spoke with Military Times about Smack’s Alpha, the wrist-worn device for which the company recently raised $61 million. He followed up to discuss its flagship product, Omega. The company shared a 14-minute video demonstration typically reserved for general officers.

“What the demo shows is a Joint Fires workflow from long-range planning, through what we would call basically the deliberate planning cycle, through the phased execution horizon, to literally right now: What do we do in the context of that larger plan?” he said.

According to the video, a commander begins the process by uploading intelligence and planning documents to give Omega operational context. The commander can then customize that information by selecting factors, such as units and boundaries. Lastly, the system generates high-level plans and detailed workflows.

“The outputs of this workflow look like what a human would create. We’re just generating it automatically for them and then letting them adjust it … We’re just doing it faster and helping them run calculations that are complicated enough that you don’t want to have someone do it on a whiteboard,” Markoff said.

He explained that Omega’s goal is to determine not just which targets to strike, but how to sequence strikes over the course of a month or two to systematically degrade an adversarial force. He added that Omega gives commanders options, along with the pros and cons of each.

“Sometimes it takes people like a month to build that plan. Building the next one to four days takes one to four days,” he said. “And figuring out, ‘What do we do right now?’ Well, the good news is you only have a few seconds, and it only takes a few seconds.”

During the execution phase shown in the video, a commander can monitor operations in real time and adjust plans using information like new intelligence reports, inventory lists or weather forecasts.

For comparison, Smack’s demo likens Omega to Amazon’s approach to the “last-mile delivery problem,” which refers to the logistical challenge of finding the most efficient and resourceful way to get a package to its destination.

Markoff explained the reasoning behind the comparison, saying that while risk tolerances and resources can change during an operation, the overall objective may not.

“It’s not just a scheduling problem, but it’s a pairing of assets and scheduling of assets,” he said, adding that it’s “optimizing that usage in the context of what we’re trying to do long term.”

The demo depicts Omega generating a large number of actions, targets and destinations. The software is designed for campaign-level threats and for developing plans at both the operational and tactical levels. But his company is actively expanding the scope of what it offers to include coordinating humanitarian efforts.

“That has not been the use case that our contracts have focused on, but there is absolutely a demand signal and a requirement for it that we are getting from the users, and it is something that we are building into that longer term,” he said.

While Smack has already shared parts of the demo in marketing materials, the company is in the process of transitioning from prototyping to production, Markoff said. Smack currently has contracts with three U.S. military branches and expects to expand to all six by the end of the year.

The Department of Defense wants to take that idea one step further and wield AI-generated “personalities” to mimic real people — and fool enemy AI trying to identify patterns in friendly cellphone traffic.

The goal is to mask “digital exhaust,” the metadata automatically emitted by mobile phones, such as location and specific device IDs. Intelligence agencies, law enforcement, militaries and even criminals have become adept at using this digital debris to locate users and analyze their behavior.

In particular, “accessing foreign mobile phone networks exposes individuals and organizations to surveillance and espionage threats,” warned the DoD Small Business Innovation Research solicitation, which opens Sept. 23 and closes Oct. 21.

“Adversaries can leverage this data to track daily routines, identify deviations indicating special events (e.g., VIP visits or mission preparation), and map sensitive facilities based on cell phone concentration or periods of inactivity,” the solicitation explained.

The solicitation doesn’t specifically mention AI-created people chatting on their mobiles. But DoD does envision a “digital exhaust deception system” in which AI “personas” generate cellphone signals that mimic the behavior of real people.

Each device should have a minimum of two personas, and eventually four or more. The device should weigh fewer than 2 pounds and have a battery life of up to 36 hours.

Merely generating fake cellphone signals isn’t enough. The device must “mimic realistic patterns of life to defeat automated network analysis,” DoD said.

At a minimum, this means defeating basic traffic analysis. Ultimately, the Pentagon wants a system that can defeat behavioral tracking by advanced AI.

Phase I of the project involves creating a design concept and algorithms, as well as listing any “proprietary software required to conduct AI-enabled mission planning and operations.” Phase II will generate a prototype, followed by Phase III and delivery of “fully integrated mission management software and hardened decoy box form factors (e.g., Wi-Fi router-sized team devices and puck-sized personal devices).”

The technology could lend itself to civilian applications. A capability to obscure cell phone metadata “directly translates to protecting high-value corporate assets, personnel, and intellectual property from commercial espionage and tracking,” the solicitation states.

Analyzing signal traffic has long been a useful intelligence tool. For example, in World War II, the U.S. Navy used it to derive intelligence on Japanese naval deployment. Today, police have software that uses cell phone data to trace a user’s past movement for months.

On the other hand, traffic analysis can boomerang on its creators. Japan used decoy radio signals in 1941 to convince U.S. analysts that the Japanese fleet was at home, rather than steaming toward Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Rather than deploying missiles to shoot down unmanned aircraft, the E-HEL fires a laser beam at its targets and can reload its magazine through the system’s power supply, according to the Army.

“This first-of-its-kind directed energy program will enable our formations to defeat unmanned systems and dominate from the outset,” Vice Chief of Staff of the Army General Christopher LaNeve said in an Army statement. “Pairing human ingenuity with advanced technology is what ensures our Army will continue to outpace America’s adversaries.”

Under the Other Transaction Agreement, AV will deliver dozens of 30 kW LOCUST laser weapons capable of taking down smaller drones that fit within what the Defense Department characterizes as groups one through three. Those include miniature UAVs comparable to the Air Force’s Wasp III to the Army’s RQ-7B Shadow in the larger class.

The E-HEL production announcement also notches a much-needed win for the service’s laser program, following soldiers’ disappointing feedback on the Army’s Directed Energy Maneuver Short-Range Air Defense (DE M-SHORAD) performance in the Middle East.

While those prototypes were tailored for the Stryker combat vehicle, AV’s LOCUST X3 laser weapon is platform-agnostic and can fit on the Army’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV).

The E-HEL program builds on the success of the Army Multi-Purpose High Energy Laser (AMP-HEL) prototypes currently in use by U.S. soldiers.

The contract follows LOCUST’s successful testing at White Sands Missile Range, led by Joint Interagency Task Force 401 (JIATF-401) and PAE Fires, which demonstrated safe, effective counter-drone operations in U.S. airspace and directly enabled a DOW–FAA safety agreement validating the system for domestic use.

A cornerstone of the Army’s ground system modernization effort, TITAN was designed to simplify the data-gathering process for soldiers aiming at far-off targets.

The Army chose Palantir as the prime contractor to develop the next-generation targeting system in 2024.

Palantir, which received $127 million, will lead TITAN’s production, alongside L3 Harris Technologies, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Strategic Technology Consulting and World Wide Technology.

Anduril, which received $65 million under the award, will manufacture the ruggedized, vehicle-mounted systems and integrate the power and thermal subsystems that allow TITAN to operate in austere environments.

The TITAN program will create an advanced variant of the system to be mounted on the Army’s tactical trucks and have the ability to gather data from space sensors, as well as a basic variant for the service’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.

The award covers procurement and integration of four advanced and four basic variants, which are slated for delivery over the next 18 months. Those will buttress the Army’s nine existing prototype units that the service uses today.

The Army expects to award additional production orders in fiscal 2027.