AUSA 2024 — The Army aims to make a break with habit in its acquisition for the high-profile Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) project, looking for industry teams to tackle the problem rather than a single player, according to a senior official.
“My sense of what I’d like to see is, you know, competition within the program,” Army undersecretary Gabe Camarillo said here at AUSA 2024 on Tuesday. “So not just one or two or three vendors that are going to kind of give you this big bang and take three or four years to do it. That’s probably the traditional way we would have done software 10 years ago. I think my view of it is we want to open up the competition. Have different teams competing, both together, on teams and against each other, in many cases.”
So far three vendors — Anduril, Palantir and Google — have been selected to work on a portion of NGC2, also known as C2 Next, specifically to develop dashboards that will display location and positional information with the goal of bolstering soldier’s situational awareness.
The companies showcased that capability at the Network Modernization Experiment (NetModX) 2024 event back in August and will do so again in March of next year at Project Convergence, an Army spokesperson told Breaking Defense in an email recently.
Additionally, earlier this month, the Program Executive Office of Command, Control, Communications-Network (PEO C3N) put out a Request for Information seeking input on “experimentation, pilots and, prototyping” in establishing NGC2. Camarillo said he’s trying to move that process along quickly while working closely with the PEO C3N.
“The goal is to get a program of record started as quickly as we can. In fiscal year [2025] we want to get a competition going. I think currently, [Mark Kitz, the program executive officer of C3N] is scheduled for a third quarter of FY25 to do it. I’m pushing him to see if we can go faster, as I always do,” Camarillo said. “But the goal is to get, you know, teams of vendors on contract and iterating because again this is not one big bang. We want to get vendors on contract. We want to try something out. We want to do it under the auspices of a formal program that, you know, we can show the Congress that we’ve got a different approach.”
Other plans to stand up NGC2 include prototyping activity by next year and a minimum viable product for new C2 capabilities by early fiscal year 2026.
Camarillo emphasized that during all of this, the requirement and acquisition process with NGC2 will vary from traditional processes not just by using a multi-vendor approach, but also because of the timeline. He said that there’s no end to NGC2 because there will continuously be new requirements as the technology develops. Also adding that because of this, the requirement process may yield “revalidation.”
“This is probably going to be a different kind of requirement, whether it automatically gets kind of revalidated over a set period of time, or whether there’s continuous revalidation, which I think is even more appropriate, involving the requirements user and the acquisition community working together. It’s going to force us to team together in ways that maybe we haven’t on a program like this ever before,” Camarillo said.
PHOTOS: AUSA 2024
Gallery
