The Pentagon announced a 10-year contract with Anduril Industries with a cumulative total value of $20 billion, consolidating current and future commercial technologies to supply the U.S. Army with “unified, mission-ready capability”. Under the assignment Anduril will develop and deploy AI-enabled decision support systems to improve the Army’s real-time data handling, intelligence feeds, and situational awareness.
It’s characterized as part of the effort underway by the Pentagon to modernize warfighting capabilities with artificial intelligence-based technologies that connect soldiers, sensors, and autonomous devices.
Anduril Industries is a defense technology company that develops AI-powered drones, autonomous underwater vehicles, and surveillance systems.
In February 2025, Anduril assumed oversight of “production, future development of hardware and software, and delivery timelines” for the U.S. Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program. IVAS is a mixed-reality headset developed to provide soldiers with enhanced situational awareness and combat capability. It merges thermal, low-light, and rapid target acquisition sensors into a heads-up display, with functions like 3D mapping, weapon sight integration, and shared, digital tactical data in real-time.
Microsoft initiated the IVAS based on its HoloLens2 technology but faced significant technical challenges. The IVAS is being implemented now on Anduril’s AI-powered software operating system Lattice OS, while Microsoft Azure has been retained as the cloud network for system data and AI workloads.
The U.S. Army is adopting Lattice as the operating system for its Command & Control (C2) is an AI-powered battle management platform, connect, analyze, and interpret data from thousands of distributed sensors, networks, and autonomous platforms, and provide real-time pictures of battlespaces. The system uses AI to identify threats (like incoming enemy drones) and automatically determine the correct defense against it.
Anduril is active in developing military drones, and is building a $1-billion, 5-million-square-foot factory in central Ohio to produce thousands of autonomous weapon systems per year, including its Barracuda and Fury drone systems. A wider range of autonomous systems may be produced there too, including hand-launchable scout drones, large surveillance planes, and AI-piloted fighter jets.
The 10-year scope of the project matches what Anduril has described as software-first approach to supplying defense technologies, updating the systems’ AI capabilities on its headsets and drones similar to updates for computers or handheld-devices, so that the Army can acquire and deploy new technologies more quickly.
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Robert Brooks
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Robert Brooks has been a business-to-business reporter, writer, editor, and columnist for more than 20 years, specializing in the primary metal and basic manufacturing industries.