Marking a major expansion in the Defense Department’s premier effort to create greater battlespace awareness in near-real-time for its theater commands and key staff, the Chief Digital and Artificial Office (CDAO) awarded Palantir Technologies [PLTR] a potential $480 million contract to quickly transition the Maven Smart System (MSS) program from the prototype phase to production.
The five-year contract was announced Wednesday evening and the initial task order is for $153 million to expand the MSS software licenses from hundreds of users at five U.S. Combatant Commands (COCOMs) and the Joint Staff to thousands beginning June 1, Shannon Clark, head of defense growth at Palantir, said during a virtual media briefing on Thursday. MSS is based on commercial software so it will be available to users in “days and weeks, not months and years,” she said.
The COCOMs that will be getting the additional software licenses are Central Command, European Command, Indo-Pacific Command, Northern Command, and Transportation Command, as will the Joint Staff, Clark said. These commands will now have an “enterprise capability with essentially no user limit,” she said. The prototype effort began in 2021.
Earlier in May, Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth, director of the National-Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), said that MSS is being referred to as CJADC2, which stands for Combined Joint All Domain Command and Control. CJADC2 is the DoD’s effort to create greater connectivity across the battlespace to link sensors, data, decision makers, and shooters, with the aim of creating decision advantage for U.S. forces.
In February, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said the department had achieved minimum viable capability with CJADC2 but did not disclose the actual capability, noting that it is not a single company or thing but a capability.
MSS is a data operations platform that integrates sensor and data inputs at a single workstation for any user to understand the disposition of friendly and adversary forces and potential targets on the battlefield and make decisions based on that information.
“Users are going to span everyone from intel analysts and operators in…some of the remote island chains across the world to leadership at the Pentagon,” Clark said.
Clark declined to discuss specific inputs into MSS but at the recent GEOINT 2024 conference, Mark Munsell, director of the Data and Innovation Directorate at NGA, told reporters that the feeds include object and target detections from satellite imagery, “And I’ll say just a hundred other inputs, right, all together into a spatial analytic environment where you can do even more artificial intelligence to derive even more important information and important analytics to make further decisions…about their situational awareness.”
In a subsequent interview with Defense Daily, Munsell said those feeds include GEOINT artificial intelligence. NGA manages the artificial intelligence-based computer vision program called Maven, which uses satellite and other imagery to locate and help identify potential targets for COCOMs and theater commanders.
In addition to bringing in the data feeds, MSS will “do the analytics on the data feeds, run programs against those, do queries to display dashboards to display information on maps, and geolocations,” he said. “And to have some synchronization of that data across the commands.”
During Palantir’s briefing, Andrew Locke, the company’s enterprise lead for DoD, presented a notional workflow of the capabilities a user could take advantage of with MSS.
Typically, creating visual displays of friendly force dispositions and their assets is updated once or twice a day using static briefings like PowerPoint presentations, resulting in outdated information that makes it challenging for a commander, Locke said. MSS enables the quick layering of additional data to those dispositions to include what their assets can see, reach, and touch, and whether they can be seen, readiness levels of personnel and equipment that could be fed by sensor data from the platforms or their maintainers, he said.
A leader will have information in seconds through “a couple of clicks” versus hours previously “to have kind of full situational awareness across all their forces,” Locke said.
The same is true for understanding where adversary forces are based on sensor and data feeds, which could also include signals, electronic, and human intelligence, satellite imagery, and even social media, he said. MSS also enables automated and manual tasking to ferret out or confirm whether something is there, he said.
AI can be layered on top of this data to find targets or other items.
“And so, we provide capability for the government to be able to leverage computer vision models really coming from another program, coming from another vendor, and deploy those models in real-time to run across that satellite imagery and try to look for objects of interest,” Locke said.
If there is an alert for an actual item of interest, imagery is put on the map that may show actual enemy equipment, allowing a user to “nominate targets” from MSS, Locke said. Humans are in the loop to verify what the AI suggests may be a target, he said.
Once targets have been nominated, a separate workflow using MSS can be used by staff to “optimize a process” for dealing with the targets, he said.
MSS is designed as an open architecture platform that is “agnostic to the data sources” and AI capabilities so that it can work with any third-party and government inputs and systems now and in the future, Clarke and Locke said.
Future task orders will be around the additional capabilities Palantir would deploy as part of MSS, Clark said. Later on Thursday, a senior defense official told reporters that the MSS contract ceiling allows for additional phases to scale the platform to other commands depending on warfighter requirements and budget constraints.
Later on Thursday, Palantir announced it has also received a $33 million Other Transaction contract from the CDAO that will allow it to securely add third-party vendor and government into MSS, which is owned by the government.