LMI and Anduril Industries are partnering to build combat-ready applications for the U.S. Army’s Next Generation Command and Control environment under a new Rapid Development Pilot.
The collaboration grew out of the Army’s Ivy Sting exercises, which validate emerging NGC2 capabilities under operational conditions. In those exercises, applications including LMI’s SHEPRD run in the NGC2 ecosystem, enabled by Lattice Mesh, and are tested alongside active Army units.
During Ivy Sting 4, LMI modified and deployed SHEPRD at IL6—the highest authorization level for cloud systems handling Secret classified data—in weeks, a process that typically takes months. That speed came from close, iterative collaboration among LMI, Anduril and the Army, with all three focused on mission outcomes.
The exercise produced a faster development cycle where capabilities could be fielded, evaluated and refined in near real time. LMI and Anduril are now extending that model through the Rapid Development Pilot, delivering additional soldier-centric applications that address operational challenges faced by warfighters.
Zach Kramer, general manager for mission command at Anduril Industries, said the measure of NGC2 is how quickly the Army can pull combat-ready capability from any partner into soldiers’ hands. SHEPRD’s deployment at Ivy Sting, he said, showed what’s possible when the platform is built to accelerate the ecosystem rather than constrain it—and the Rapid Development Pilot with LMI is how that becomes 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 pilot moves away from traditional program-of-record cadences toward continuous, mission-driven development cycles, a model LMI and Anduril say can set the pace for delivering tools the Army needs as threats evolve.