iscover
Anduril Australia has recently shown off its Menace-X mobile command, communications and control system to key decision makers and defence industry.
Australian Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy reportedly toured the system and a Polaris variant was displayed last week at the annual Military Communications and Information Systems Conference in Canberra this week.
Menace is envisioned as a family of fully integrated, turnkey command, control, communications and computing solutions for operators in contested environments and resource-poor environments.
“This product is our Menace-X, and this is a mobile C4 (command, control, communications and computing system),” according to Anduril Australia executive chairman David Goodrich, speaking to Defence Connect at MiLCIS.
“It’s recognising that the future battlespace will be pushing compute as far to the edge as possible … This is the opposite of the traditional system where there’s the hub where the compute is done and that spokes out to where the war is being fought or the battle is being fought.
“The latency of that traditional system and the likelihood that those connections will be disrupted means that that is no longer a reliable architecture.”
The vehicle displayed at MiLCIS was shown to feature a Starlink system, traditional RF antenna, additional SATCOM and cellular capabilities.
“Disruption and denial is a reality in the battlespace of today. You cannot just rely on one form of communications infrastructure,” Goodrich said.
“The artificial intelligence decides continuously what is the best information bearer that can be used to get specifically the right packet of information, whether it’s for targeting, whether it’s for joint fires, or whatever is needed to the right other node in the mesh network.
“And this is all happening at software speeds, not at human control speeds … This is a very resilient mobile capability and because it’s mobile, it’s very difficult for adversaries to target.
“All of this capability could be put onto a Bushmaster, it could be put into someone’s office. We have a form factor of Menace as a self-driving shipping container that fits inside a C-130 (aircraft).
“Nine minutes after rolling off the plane, Menace can be operational by the side of an airfield.”
