Army, Industry Plan Hackathon Series on Shared Technology

The U.S. Army is partnering with technology providers including Anduril, Boeing, General Dynamics, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, Perennial Autonomy, and RTX on a series of hackathons aimed at integrating critical military technology systems.

The ‘Right to Integrate’ (R2I) hackathon is an Army-industry “sprint” to enable weapon systems and business systems across the Army to integrate, share data, and communicate with each other.

The first hackathon will be held at Fort Carson, Colo., in the coming weeks, according to the Army’s announcement.

Participating technology providers will offer support the effort “with dozens of pieces of technology and equipment, as well as engineers and scientists”, the Army said.

The companies will sign a statement of support for the Army’s integration efforts, for both current systems and future systems still in development, the Army said. The statement will note that the hackathon sprint will be carried out at no cost to the Army.

According to officials, the Army has historically contracted with defense companies for warfighting systems under a siloed approach to procurement and program management within both the government and the defense sector. Officials said this approach has often required additional time, cost, and field service support to integrate data or systems. These integrations and did not always succeed.

“We’ve known for a long time that our systems, weapons, and sensors need to talk to each other so that we can dominate the battlefield,” Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll said.

The Army began moving to an open system architecture with its Next Generation Command and Control effort and is now expanding the approach to additional systems, officials said.

“We cannot fight from a swivel chair across multiple disaggregated systems anymore. We must integrate at the speed of digital information, and leverage the technologies of our time, like agentic artificial intelligence, drone swarms, and cyber weapons,” Driscoll said.