Smack Technologies lands new deal for AI prototype to enhance joint military campaigning
Smack Technologies will prototype its AI-powered military planning and decision support platform with U.S. Special Operations Command via a new Other Transaction agreement worth up to $7.5 million, the Texas-based startup’s Founder and CEO Andy Markoff told DefenseScoop.
He discussed Smack’s “Omega” offering, which is designed to generate courses of action for joint military campaigning, ahead of the company’s official award announcement on Monday.
“It accelerates and integrates command-level planning and operations: commanders can generate operational objectives, the tactics that achieve them, and the tasks that achieve those — all linked as a single plan,” Markoff said in an email. “As the fight changes and assessments come in, Omega enables commanders to repair the plan in seconds, and shows where they actually stand against their objectives.”
The deal comes as SOCOM is fast-tracking frontier AI capabilities to solve real-world operational challenges and free up its leaders to focus on the most complex strategic and tactical priorities.
Markoff said Omega is built on Smack’s “suite of small, domain-specific models that leverage a hybridized algorithm approach ranging from classical planning algorithms to deep reinforcement learning.” He noted that in the limited instances that a third-party large language model is applied, “its role is narrowly scoped, and its responses are grounded in Smack’s proprietary context graph.”
The team designed the platform to be resilient against existing and emerging threats — like adversarial AI attacks, spoofed sensor data, or intentional data poisoning — in three primary ways, according to Markoff.
“First, Omega doesn’t depend on constant cloud connectivity,” he noted.
The models are small enough to run on-prem at distributed nodes. Each node works within a harness set by higher headquarters, solves locally when communications drop, and transmits data when a window opens.
Second, as previously noted, the platform also pairs classical planning algorithms that are deterministic and explainable with generative ones.
“Third, we prioritize offline learning,” Markoff said. “Adversaries will flood the battlespace with spoofed and poisoned data, so we validate new data before any model learns from it. Because we run many small models, we can retrain only the model that needs it, and can push a vetted update fast.”
Smack was co-founded by a team of Marine Corps special operations veterans, including Markoff, a former Marine Raider.
“We’ve been the end user. We know these requirements because we’ve lived them, and the commanders we work with can see that we understand their problem,” he told DefenseScoop.
The startup’s OTA with SOCOM follows other prototyping contracts it was tapped for by the Marines, Air Force and Navy. Markoff said he expects Omega to move into production across multiple branches of the U.S. military in the coming months.
