L3Harris develops and delivers advanced, resilient communications and data management solutions to the U.S. Department of Defense and commercial marketplace – and has for decades. Partnering with Palantir, a pioneer and market leader in deploying innovative artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, allows the two companies to begin exploring and exploiting complementary competencies and natural synergies to benefit the Joint Force.
In late October 2024, L3Harris and Palantir initiated this strategic partnership to capitalize on their specific core competencies and work to rapidly develop user solutions.
“We are a proven Defense Department company that has delivered both at scale and on schedule for countless DOD programs, and Palantir comes with a strong commercial model, that can leverage our knowledge and core experiences with the government,” said Sam Mehta, President, Communication Systems, L3Harrris. “We both have exciting new capabilities to deliver. Between our end-user insight, software-defined platform positions, and Field Service Representative support worldwide and Palantir’s innovation and investments, we can unleash a new paradigm for what it means to deliver warfighter-enabling capabilities to the field at speeds unthinkable just a decade ago.”
Realizing Radio-as-a-Sensor
L3Harris Technologies has demonstrated through lab exercises the capability to integrate Palantir’s data integration, analytics and decision-aid software platform – Foundry – with protected software-defined tactical radio networks, one of several examples of the partnership in action.
The proof-of-concept exercise showcased the force-multiplying capabilities L3Harris and Palantir can bring to military organizations by incorporating emerging software platforms – currently in development – into existing fielded radios through their software-defined architectures.
The L3Harris radios’ design allows upgrades to extend capabilities not imagined during the original hardware design, according to Shane Eisenman, Director, Technology & Innovations, L3Harris.
Due to the software-defined architectures of the radios, the possibilities for new technology insertions could be endless based on customer needs, but a major benefit within this collaboration is the rapid processing of the immense amount of data L3Harris equipment can gather and transmit throughout the battlespace. This leads to a more-informed Common Operational Picture for faster decision making across the echelons.
“We provide resilient, tactical radios that can sense the Radio Frequency spectrum and provide useful data to power automated performance optimization and support new services,” Eisenman said. “Palantir’s unique software can integrate, synthesize and provide information to users and leaders to make critical network decisions. Blending our combined best-of-breed capabilities, we can deliver an enterprise data solution for all collected data to model and understand the current RF environment, enemy signals and friendly RF interference to support more-effective tactical operations.”
An Emerging Partnership
The joint team brainstormed nearly a dozen near-term pursuits within the scope of their expertise during initial discussions, with “Radio-as-a-Sensor” being one of the top candidates to pursue, according to Eisenman.
“We are looking specifically at software-defined radios we have installed in the field and what information we could pull off them to harness the power of Palantir’s data-organization capabilities and data insight tools to provide a transformative capability to our customers,” Eisenman said. “The concept is we can aggregate the information from dozens, even hundreds of radios operating in the field through Palantir’s Foundry software and forward-deploy new algorithms and decisions to the radio for future situations based on what it learns from how previous engagements play out. The insights required to determine these new behaviors wouldn’t be possible from observing a single radio platform.”
Eisenman noted this proof-of-concept was merely the first step in confirming the two technologies could integrate together, and the “novel insights” the new enabling capability can provide will be vetted as a next step.
“In the future through successful progress, we can deliver radio systems across the DOD force structure that could better adapt to their environment and offer superior performance to the end user, powered by novel data insights enabled by Palantir’s capabilities,” Eisenman added.
