Press Release_

Tysons, VA – LMI announced today a Rapid Development Pilot with Anduril Industries to generate targeted capabilities for the U.S. Army’s Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) environment. LMI is building combat-ready applications for use in the ecosystem, which makes emerging technologies available across the Army Enterprise. The pilot offers a new model for conceiving, validating, and fielding critical defense solutions, compressing timelines to deliver mission-ready capabilities at the speed required by modern warfare.

The collaboration has roots in the Army’s Ivy Sting exercises, which validate emerging NGC2 capabilities under operational conditions. In this series, applications like LMI’s SHEPRD^TM are hosted in the NGC2 ecosystem, enabled by Lattice Mesh, and tested in field exercises alongside active Army units.

During Ivy Sting 4, LMI rapidly modified and deployed SHEPRD at IL6 – the highest level of authorization for cloud systems handling Secret classified data – in a matter of weeks, a process that would traditionally take months or longer. That acceleration was made possible through close, iterative collaboration between LMI, Anduril, and the Army, with all three focused on mission outcomes over ownership.

The result was a fundamentally different development cycle, where capabilities could be fielded, evaluated, and refined in near real time. Building on that success, LMI and Anduril now embark on a Rapid Development Pilot to extend this model, delivering additional soldier-centric applications that address real operational challenges faced by warfighters.

“The promise of NGC2 is a virtual arsenal of built-for-combat apps that are accessible to any and all units as needed, and that’s compelling on its own,” said SHEPRD Platform Lead Allen Rivers. “But we’ve also shown that you can deliver these solutions securely, as they’re needed, with an incredibly short turnover between ideation, production, and deployment. That combination of pace and availability is a game changer.”

"The measure of NGC2 is how fast the Army can pull combat-ready capability from any partner into soldiers' hands,” said Zach Kramer, GM for Mission Command, Anduril Industries. “SHEPRD's deployment at Ivy Sting showed what's possible when the platform is built to accelerate the ecosystem instead of constrain it, and this Rapid Development Pilot with LMI is how we make that the standard across the Army enterprise."

“What we proved at Ivy Sting is that you can take a capability from concept to deployment in weeks, not months, even in secure environments,” said LMI CTO Jared Summers. “Anduril has built the ecosystem to make that possible, and together we’re showing what a new model for delivering capability looks like.”

The three-month Rapid Development Pilot points to a new direction for capability development in the defense industry. By pivoting away from traditional program-of-record cadences toward continuous, mission-driven cycles, LMI and Anduril will demonstrate how innovation can set the pace for delivering tools the Army needs to control an evolving threat landscape.

“Future conflicts will demand C2 ecosystems that can leverage hardware and software at the pace of conflict,” said Josh Wilson, LMI’s CEO. “What we’re demonstrating here is how fast capability can move when you incentivize outcomes rather than rigid delivery structures.”  

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