Anduril Industries on Monday said the newest product in its Menace expeditionary command and control (C2) family is in production and being distributed globally, giving customers a small vehicle-based workstation to enable, analyze, and sustain mission execution in denied and degraded communications environments at the tactical edge.
Menace-X, which the company first unveiled last December, is built onto a Polaris [PII] MRZR buggy that can be forward deployed, and quickly redeployed, in austere and contested environments, giving warfighters the ability to receive multi-domain sensor data at the tactical level to task targets and prosecute missions.
“Fully operational within minutes of aircraft roll-off, Menace-X allows teams at the tactical edge to C2 forces, fires, and effects at the speed and scale necessary to achieve overmatch of the pacing threat,” Tom Keane, senior vice president of engineering at Anduril, said in a statement. In a virtual media briefing on April 26, he said “Menace-X enables a wide range of mission sets, so things like long-range precision fires, time sensitive targeting, sharing common operating pictures, and deep sensing.”
Anduril in September 2022 introduced Menace-Integrated, a containerized secure command, control, communications, and computing (C4) system that it said then was designed to plan and execute missions in “geographically dispersed and austere locations.” Specifically, the company said Menace-I supports the Air Force’s Agile Combat Employment and the Marine Corps Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations, two expeditionary warfare schemes designed to rapidly disperse operational centers to increase survivability while maintaining the ability to have situational awareness, plan, task, and generate combat power.
Deploying current expeditionary C4 platforms are large, complex, and can take hours to assemble and disassemble, and require transport in multiple trucks or large cargo aircraft like a C-17 but there are “none that are operating in minutes. None that that are integrated into the vehicle in this way, in this form factor…especially this level of mobility, and this small size and footprint,” Keane said of Menace-X to reporters.
Menace-X can be transported by the MV-22 tiltrotor aircraft, C-130 transport plane, the CH-53 and MH-47 heavy-lift helicopters and most other air and naval platforms for global deployment, Anduril said.
The highly-mobile open architecture C4 platform features a touchscreen interface and multiple software-defined, intelligent communications pathways including proliferated low-Earth orbit, geostationary Earth orbit, cellular, ultra and very high frequency, high frequency and wideband high frequency, hardline, and Link 16. Menace-X can also receive Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast, Automatic Identification System, and Integrated Broadcast Service data feeds.
Menace-X has been successfully demonstrated at the Marine Corps Weapons and Tactics Instructor Course and the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone event, Anduril said. Menace-X and Menace-I will also be fielding at multiple exercises in the coming weeks, Keane said.
Menace-X was developed using an iterative cycle based on customer feedback, Keane said. The C4 system can also be integrated into other vehicles, he said.
Anduril is seeing demand from the Marine Corps and other customers in the U.S. and globally, Keanee said, although he declined to disclose production volumes.
As for cost, Keane said that Menace-X is a unique C4 platform without peer in terms of a small, integrated, rapidly deployable, mobile, and quick to commence operations system, so there is no way to compare pricing. Costs will depend on configuration and mission applications, he said.