The U.S. Army has awarded Anduril Industries a contract worth up to $1.8 billion to move its Next-Generation Command and Control system from large-scale testing toward operational deployment, beginning with I Corps.

The award has a base value of $162.8 million, with options that could bring the total value to $1.8 billion over five years, Anduril said Monday.

The work will focus on expanding the Army's Next-Generation Command and Control, or NGC2, common data layer, with I Corps set to become the first major operational user. The system is designed to allow military units to share data across equipment, software and networks made by different vendors.

Anduril said the effort marks a shift from division-level experimentation to corps-level deployment. That will put the system in a larger and more demanding operating environment, particularly as I Corps operates across wide distances in the Pacific and must be able to function when communications are disrupted or intermittent.

NGC2 is intended to replace fragmented networks with a common software and data framework that allows the Army to integrate new applications and systems without rebuilding the underlying architecture. Anduril's Lattice platform serves as the distributed data layer, connecting sensors, weapons and applications that were not originally designed to work together.

The Army established the NGC2 common data baseline in June 2026 and selected Anduril to lead the effort.

The program has been tested extensively over the past year. In July 2025, the Army continued an Other Transaction Authority agreement supporting an NGC2 prototype with the 4th Infantry Division. That was followed by a series of Ivy Sting exercises in which engineers worked alongside soldiers to identify problems, update the software, and test revised versions in the field.

Within roughly a year, the system expanded into a division-level architecture covering areas including fires, intelligence, sustainment and aviation. During the Ivy Mass exercise, more than 2,500 user devices and multiple applications operated on the same underlying data architecture, according to Anduril.

The company said testing also produced improvements in battlefield response times. During one exercise, NGC2 reduced artillery fire timelines by 90% compared with legacy systems, while other exercises demonstrated data sharing among Army, Marine Corps and Navy systems without requiring troops to manually move information between disconnected networks.

The Army also tested NGC2 under degraded communications conditions, part of an effort to allow units to continue operating even when connections to higher headquarters are lost.

The new award gives Anduril a larger role in taking the system from experimentation into field deployment as the Army seeks to build a more connected command-and-control architecture across its forces.