AUGUSTA, Ga. — The baseline AI layer for the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control (NGC2) architecture is being built by the software and technology firm Striveworks, Army officials told Breaking Defense on Tuesday.
The news comes as the service prepares to roll out NGC2 at the corps-level next year with a focus on Pacific operations.
“There’s going to be a lot of software data, the volume of all of that being processed at the corps level is going to be greater,” Joseph Welch, portfolio acquisition executive for command and control and counter-command and control, said in an interview here at the TechNet Augusta conference.
“When we talk about the AI tools that we’re going to be bringing in to help support that, it’s going to become more important,” he added. “We’re making progress in that area.”
In June, the Army announced that Anduril would establish a data layer baseline for NGC2. Service officials have called that data layer the foundation of NGC2 — which is the Army’s modern digital architecture that seeks to unify battlefield communications and speed up decision-making — as it allows a common baseline for software and services to be built on top of and integrated within.
But turning the enormous amount of battlefield data that NGC2 gorges on into actionable information will be aided by Striveworks, an AI operations company based in Austin, Texas. The firm’s models will be able to compress “hours of staff work into seconds,” Striveworks CEO Jim Rebesco said in a statement to Breaking Defense.
“Today’s battlefields are flooded with more real-time data, from drones, sensors, and feeds, than humans alone can process to meet the needs of the mission,” Rebesco said. “Just as the data layer helps prevent information from becoming trapped in stovepipes, the AI layer allows the Army to align the best model with the right data and apply them to the mission — while maintaining the human oversight and governance needed, so we can trust the results.”
NGC2 prototypes have already been tested at the division level — by the 4th and 25th infantry divisions — but will now have to be scaled to the corps level with much more data. In fiscal 2027, the Army plans to field and scale the architecture within I Corps, which is headquartered at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash., with oversight of Army units in the Asia Pacific.
Welch said Striveworks will be responsible for providing the AI layer with model registry, validation, deployment and monitoring.
Moreover, as soldiers and others continue to develop algorithms that serve specific needs, the AI repository will allow those models to be available for all within the ecosystem, as opposed to just their unit.
It also sets a level of commonality that others can build toward and integrate within.
“It lets soldiers take advantage of new AI capabilities as fast as the industry can design them, rather than waiting months or years to put them to work,” Rebesco said in his statement.