Lockheed and Army’s 25th ID to kick off Lightning Strike to prototype NGC2

AUSA 2025 — Lockheed Martin and 25th Infantry Division will incrementally test a prototype for the Army’s Next Generation Command and Control through a series of events dubbed Lightning Strike.

The Army awarded Lockheed a $26 million Other Transaction Authority in September to provide an integrated data layer for 25th ID as part of the service’s NGC2 effort, which aims to provide commanders and units a new approach to manage information, data, and command and control with agile and software-based architectures.

Lightning Strike, which will kick off around February, is a similar concept to what 4th Infantry Division and its industry partner, Anduril and its team of vendors, are executing through the 4th ID’s Ivy Sting series.

“We’ll do a series of Lightning Strike demonstrations which ultimately lead to participation in Project Convergence [Capstone 6] next year,” Chandra Marshall, vice president and general manager of multi-domain combat solutions at Lockheed, said in an interview at the annual AUSA conference. “We’re working through with the 25th ID right now on exactly what we’re going to demonstrate at each of those Lightning Strikes. Not completely defined yet, but we’re framing it out right now with them.”

Though both Lockheed and Anduril are building NGC2 prototypes, Army officials have previously said they view the two not as competing but complementary efforts. Lockheed is building a different capability than the Anduril team at 4th ID, and the Army has maintained it wants to inject a diverse set of capabilities and vendors to prototype and inform what the eventual NGC2 ecosystem will look like.

The Army awarded Lockheed and its team through an ongoing commercial solutions offering, in which companies can continue to submit white papers based on capabilities that could be just for small slices of NGC2, such as transport, or it could be the entire stack. The intent is to be able to onboard new capabilities and vendors if they have a viable solution that works better than what currently exists.  

Marshall explained Lockheed is developing what equates to a software architecture stack, equating it somewhat to the operating system that would run an ecosystem of other, even third-party applications. The goal of NGC2 is to eventually consolidate the tools’ disparate staff and warfighting functions used into applications on a single architecture to provide greater situational awareness on the battlefield.

“Ultimately, I think where the Army is going is they want to own the data. Our job is to help them facilitate an architecture that allows them to do that and allows us to look across different applications and figure out what makes the most sense from incorporation in the future,” Marshall said.

Likewise Richard Calabrese, director of strategic growth at Lockheed, said the Army wants the tech to be “open and scalable, to bring in new applications.”

“One of the strengths of Lockheed Martin is to be able to facilitate, helping to bring disparate sources from small businesses, non-traditionals or other large primes into this architecture. That’s what we bring to bear. Is that pipeline, the DevSecOps pipeline and the ability to bring together and integrate,” Calabrese said during the same interview. “If you look at our architecture, it really is comprised of a whole host of commercial products being brought together to create the various levels of the stack.”

Part of the work is to make sure that the current architecture at 25th ID works and if not, figure out how. The Army division has already received a bevy of modernized network equipment under what the Army calls C2 Fix. As the Army was developing the NGC2 concept, certain priority units required modernized kits to fulfill the “fight tonight” mission, which primarily involved existing capabilities but architected in a different manner.

“Our job is to then verify, does the full stack architecture run on the C2 Fix hardware and we’re trying to demonstrate as many vertical slices through the stack as we can. … We’re not locked into specific hardware. It’s not like this is the hardware you have to make it work. They’re looking for us to help inform them of what the architecture needs to be. I think they would say we’d love for that C2 Fix hardware to be the final solution, but if you’re exercising it and it requires more bandwidth or CPU or whatever, then tell us that so that we can scale the hardware appropriately,” Calabrese said.

The first iteration of Ivy Sting that tested the parallel NGC2 prototype at the 4th ID focused on a narrow use case of new artillery fire command and control software. Calabrese said a “fires app” might be the first thing Lockheed toys with as well, before perhaps a logistics capability, then “we’ll just keep adding.”

“The objective here is, through these Lightning Strike events, is to make incremental progress towards broadening and proving out that the full stack architecture works, including things like [denied, degraded, intermittent, and limited] environments and stuff computing at the edge,” he added.