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In case Operation Jailbreak, ongoing NGC2 exercises, and the Pentagon’s all-encompassing Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) initiative didn’t give it away, integration is quickly becoming the word of the year in the defense world.
Logistics is one of the areas where the whole “making sure all this new software coming onto the scene works together so we can get things where they need to be” thing is most critical, and that’s especially true for a global fighting force with a whole bunch of moving parts like the Marines.
Well, luckily, the Marines now have a little help from some new startup friends.
This morning, logistics startup DEFCON AI announced in an exclusive release to Tectonic that it’s secured a five-year, $115M contract with the Marine Corps to serve as the software integration prime for the service’s Logistics Command and Control (LogC2) modernization push.
Thinking bigger: If you’re thinking, “Wait, doesn’t DEFCON do contested logistics stuff?” you’d be right, but the company—founded in 2022 out of Red Cell’s incubator—has taken a bit of a pivot in the past year.
“Originally, we started in the logistics world, and what we found out is that what we’re really doing is more resilient optimization of complex systems, so no matter what the system is, we’re [optimizing] much larger ecosystems,” co-founder and CTO Scott Stapp told Tectonic.
That’s what this contract is all about.
Race to integrate: DEFCON AI still has its own contested logistics AI software (called ARTIV), but under the deal with the Marine Corps, the company is tasked with making sure everyone else’s can work seamlessly together, from Palantir’s ubiquitous Maven Smart System and Anduril’s Lattice down to Rune’s frontline sustainment software.
“We have two pieces to this large Marine Corps contract,” Stapp said. “One is to deploy this logistics capability, scale it, and then continue to upgrade it, and the other one is acting as the prime integrator for the Marine Corps on all new capabilities that come in to ensure they technologically work and fit together.”
“We will do all the technical work and the integration work, working with all those [subcontractors],” he added, “But the decision maker is the Marine Corps, and our job is to constantly give them the best information on the opportunity space at the technical level…so they can actually make decisions.”
Teamwork: That’s important because, as Stapp puts it, the primes and data neo-primes alike “want to control the world and build everything in [their] own vision.” (He’s allowed to say that. He co-founded DEFCON after serving as Northrop Grumman’s CTO.)
DEFCON’s role is more “agnostic.” The company will make sure everyone building logistics software is playing nice before delivering the integrated capability to the Marine Corps, and—if this goes well—to other services in the future.
“This is almost a test case of bringing in a company to act as that prime integrator,” Stapp said. “The Marine Corps can test the logistics [capability] and demonstrate how to actually grow this ecosystem to actually work together, and then extrapolate it across the broader JADC2 ecosystem from there.”
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