Exclusive: L3Harris-Palantir combo nets night vision production gains
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Illustration: Allie Carl/Axios
A partnership between L3Harris Technologies and Palantir Technologies is producing "significant improvement" in night-vision goggle production, among other payoffs, according to the companies.
Why it matters: American manufacturing is under the microscope.
- That's especially true for military contractors, amid calls for additional capacity and reindustrialization.
Driving the news: L3Harris' Samir Mehta and Palantir's Kevin Kawasaki described to Axios at the Reagan National Defense Forum how collating and modeling the right data pulled from the right systems has refined results at facilities in Londonderry, New Hampshire.
- "If we get an order for 500 goggles, and it's a drop-in order, and Special Operations Command says it's the most important thing that we should be working on ... we can simulate that very quickly and say: 'In order to accommodate that, here's what we need to do: We need more labor here, we need to divert some supply chain there, we're six parts short that we have to go expedite,'" Mehta said.
- In some cases, decisions that previously took days or weeks are now taking hours.
State of play: L3Harris and Palantir revealed partnership plans in October 2024. The two were already working together on the Army's Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Nodes, futuristic command-and-control trucks.
- Their collaboration has since netted advances in situational awareness and target identification as well as in using radios as sensors.
- "There's information and data everywhere," Mehta said. "There's oodles of it."
Follow the money: L3Harris announced a $263 million deal for continued Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular production in January.
The bottom line: "We see bringing artificial intelligence to U.S. manufacturing as a national security issue," Kawasaki told Axios.
- "If you need to increase capacity in the United States, we can't just double our labor force. It doesn't exist," he said.
- "I need the person standing and sitting on the manufacturing line to have the best technology. And I need the warfighter to have the best technology, as well."
Go deeper: Ukrainian feedback is fueling L3Harris radio updates
