Menace / Menace-X

Menace is Anduril Industries ’ expeditionary command-and-control system — the box, vehicle or case that carries the company’s Lattice software to places without fixed infrastructure. First launched in September 2022, it answers a mundane but stubborn problem: a traditional deployable command post or temporary secure facility can take a day or more to stand up, while a small unit at the edge of a fight often needs a fused picture, secure comms and real compute in minutes. Menace is designed to be operational in roughly ten minutes with a couple of people, and to keep working when individual communications links drop.

The product has grown into a family of form factors. The original Menace is air-transportable on a single C-130. Menace-X mounts the kit on a Polaris MRZR or similar vehicle for mobile command on the move, knitting together as many as half a dozen two-way communications paths — low-earth-orbit and geostationary satellite, cellular, UHF and VHF, high-frequency radio and Link-16 — and letting Lattice’s networking software pick whichever links survive in a degraded environment. Menace-I packages the system into a container with an accredited secure facility and heavy on-site compute, including high-performance and GPU processing demonstrated being sling-loaded under a CH-53K. The smallest, Menace-T, fits into two transit cases and starts with a push of a button. The compute across the line is built on Klas Voyager hardware, which Anduril brought in-house through its acquisition of Klas.

The customers are American. The Marine Corps has flown and sling-loaded Menace nodes in exercises such as Steel Knight; US Special Operations Command is the natural fit for the vehicle-mounted Menace-X; and the Army has run the system through Project Convergence experimentation. Anduril said in 2024 that Menace-X was in production and being distributed globally, though it has not disclosed unit counts or named foreign operators. The pitch throughout is the same as the rest of the company’s catalogue: the same console and software an operator already uses for drone tracks and counter-UAS, packed into something that can be unloaded from a truck and switched on at the edge.