“Military operations are inherently human endeavors, characterized by violence and continuous adaptation by all participants. Successful execution requires Army forces to make and implement effective decisions faster than enemy forces.”
-Army Doctrinal Publication 6-0, Mission Command
Anduril Industries announced today that it has been awarded a $159 million contract by the U.S. Army for an initial prototyping period to develop a night vision and mixed reality system as part of the Soldier Borne Mission Command (formerly IVAS Next) program. This award represents the largest effort of its kind to equip every soldier with superhuman perception and decision-making capabilities—fusing the best of night vision, augmented reality, and AI into a single system.
Today’s warfighters benefit from decades of steady improvements in night vision technology, but even the best NVGs remain fundamentally limited: they provide sight, not perception. They don’t fuse multiple spectral bands, integrate battlefield data, or enable soldiers to command robotic teammates directly from their display. At the same time, command systems remain largely designed for static command posts, not for soldiers in contested, communication-degraded environments.
In a forward-deployed environment, a squad leader must stitch together maps, radios, and ad hoc apps just to know where their team is, what the threat looks like, and how higher headquarters wants them to move. Intelligence gets trapped in silos, updates arrive too late, and every new piece of gear adds complexity instead of clarity. The result: warfighters lose precious seconds just trying to get a common picture of the fight. In a world where success depends on making and implementing decisions faster than the enemy, that’s an unacceptable disadvantage.
The Solution
Anduril’s solution reimagines the battlefield interface giving soldiers superhero-like abilities. In collaboration with leading technology partners—including Meta; OSI; Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.; and Gentex Corporation—Anduril is developing a helmet-mounted mixed reality system that unites advanced night vision with augmented reality overlays. This creates a single perceptual layer that fuses day, night, and thermal imagery with real-time battlefield intelligence. Soldiers will see farther, across more spectral bands, through an intuitive, real-time display. Instead of toggling between devices, warfighters will perceive a unified picture of their environment—accelerating understanding and enabling faster, better decisions.
The competitively awarded SBMC contract provides Anduril with the opportunity to deliver a generational leap in both capability and hardware ergonomics. Anduril and its partners are developing a modular component framework, enabling soldiers to select the most effective loadout for their specific mission needs.
Soldier Borne Mission Command Architecture
Originally launched as the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), Soldier Borne Mission Command-Architecture (SBMC-A) is the software backbone for the Army’s new mission systems. While the broader SBMC program delivers new helmet-mounted displays and edge compute hardware, SBMC-A provides the open software platform that integrates them into a fielded, soldier-ready capability, continuously iterated with Army combat units. Built on Anduril’s Lattice platform, SBMC-A is led by Anduril in partnership with Palantir Technologies, L3Harris Technologies; Persistent Systems, LLC; Sierra Nevada Company; DTC; Maxar Intelligence; Kägwerks; and others, all working together to advance integrated capabilities across the Soldier Borne Mission Command ecosystem.
Working with its partners and leveraging over 260,000 hours of soldier input from the IVAS program, Anduril has integrated IVAS 1.2 headsets as surrogates with Lattice, completing multiple field tests with the Army to advance SBMC-A as the foundation for future helmet-mounted mixed reality systems. SBMC-A has undergone four soldier exercises and been tested in combat training scenarios using a mesh of heads-up displays, and body- and vehicle-borne edge compute devices. Through Anduril’s SBMC-A, drones were directly tasked from over three kilometers away via a line-of-sight radio connection to a Lattice-integrated IVAS 1.2 headset, allowing individual soldiers to command and control drones from their HUD without a dedicated drone pilot.
Fourteen industry partners are actively engaged in the SBMC-A program, with third-party developers already onboarded to the Lattice Partner Ecosystem via the Lattice Software Development Kit (SDK) to expand capabilities inside the Lattice Mesh. Most notably, Anduril has reduced over-the-air software update timelines by 99 percent—cutting the process from two days to just 15 minutes—enabled by Lattice’s optimized test and fleet management tools. With daily updates pushing to the field, Anduril is accelerating delivery timelines, reducing costs, and continuously improving SBMC-A through real-world soldier feedback and operational testing.
Together, SBMC and SMBC-A are about human perceptual augmentation: giving soldiers the ability to see beyond the limits of human senses and act with speed and clarity across every domain of the fight. SBMC will allow every soldier to see farther, know more, and act faster than ever before, redefining what it means to fight and win in the 21st century.
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