The U.S. Army has awarded Anduril Industries a contract worth up to $1.8 billion over five years to expand the common data layer for its Next-Generation Command and Control (NGC2) effort, beginning with I Corps, the company announced Oct. 5.
The contract includes an initial base period valued at $162.8 million, with options that could bring the total value to $1.8 billion over five years, according to Anduril.
The award moves NGC2 from division-scale prototyping toward operational fielding at the corps level. I Corps oversees four Army divisions in the Pacific, where units can operate thousands of miles apart and must coordinate with joint and allied forces despite disrupted or intermittent communications.
NGC2 is designed as a common software and data architecture connecting sensors, weapons, vehicles, applications, and operators across systems built by different vendors. Anduril’s Lattice platform provides the distributed data layer that connects those elements within the architecture.
The Army began testing Team Anduril’s NGC2 prototype with the 4th Infantry Division in 2025, with soldiers and engineers refining the system through a series of field exercises. In June 2026, following that prototyping effort, the Army selected Anduril to lead the NGC2 common data layer baseline.
During the Ivy Mass exercise in spring 2026, Anduril said NGC2 connected more than 2,500 soldier end-user devices and supported dozens of software applications on the same data network. The company also said testing demonstrated sharply reduced artillery-fire timelines and enabled Army, Marine Corps, and Navy systems to exchange information without operators manually transferring data between disconnected systems.
The new contract extends that work from a division-level prototype to a larger operational formation operating in a more geographically dispersed and demanding communications environment.
“No single company should control every element of the Army’s command-and-control stack,” Anduril said in its announcement.
The company said the common data layer is intended to allow the Army to select and integrate technologies from multiple suppliers without rebuilding the underlying architecture each time it adds a new sensor, application, or weapon.
Fielding NGC2 with I Corps will put that modular approach to a larger operational test as the Army seeks to maintain command and data sharing across widely dispersed units when portions of the broader network are disrupted or unavailable.