Smack Technologies will prototype its AI-powered military planning platform with US Special Operations Command under a new Other Transaction agreement worth up to $7.5 million. Founder and chief executive Andy Markoff told DefenseScoop about the deal ahead of the company’s official award announcement on Monday. The platform, called Omega, generates courses of action for joint military campaigning and repairs plans in seconds as new assessments arrive. The agreement follows earlier prototyping contracts with the Marines, the Air Force and the Navy, and Markoff expects Omega to move into production across multiple branches in the coming months.
What Omega Does
Omega is designed to accelerate and integrate command-level planning and operations. Markoff said commanders can generate operational objectives, the tactics that achieve them and the tasks that achieve those, all linked as a single plan. As the fight changes and assessments come in, Omega repairs the plan in seconds and shows commanders where they stand against their objectives. The deal comes as Special Operations Command fast-tracks frontier AI capabilities to solve real-world operational challenges and free its leaders to focus on complex strategic and tactical priorities.
Smack was co-founded by a team of Marine Corps special operations veterans, including Markoff, a former Marine Raider. Markoff told DefenseScoop the team has lived the requirements it builds for, saying: “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.”
Small Models, Built For Disconnected Fighting
Omega is built on a suite of small, domain-specific models using a hybrid approach ranging from classical planning algorithms to deep reinforcement learning. Where a third-party large language model is used at all, Markoff said its role is narrowly scoped and its responses are grounded in Smack’s proprietary context graph. The design reflects a bet that planning tools for special operations must work when connectivity fails, not only when it holds.
Markoff set out three defences against adversarial AI attacks, spoofed sensor data and intentional data poisoning. First, Omega does not depend on constant cloud connectivity: the models are small enough to run on-premises at distributed nodes, each working within a harness set by higher headquarters, solving locally when communications drop and transmitting data when a window opens. Second, the platform pairs deterministic and explainable classical planning algorithms with generative ones. Third, it prioritises offline learning, validating new data before any model learns from it, so only the model that needs retraining is retrained and a vetted update can be pushed fast.
Why It Matters
Special operations planning has always been a race between a plan and a changing battlefield. A tool that regenerates linked objectives, tactics and tasks in seconds, rather than forcing staff to rebuild a plan by hand, shortens that race. The more important test is whether the tool survives the conditions it is built for: contested communications, poisoned data and adversaries trying to corrupt the models themselves. Smack’s small-model, on-premises design answers that test directly, trading the raw power of frontier models for resilience and explainability.
The contract also shows how defence AI buying is shifting toward small, specialised vendors. Recent coverage of military AI on this site includes Helsing’s Contra air defence system against drone swarms and Palantir’s NATO Maven AI system, both cases where AI platforms moved from prototype toward operational use. Smack’s path from three service prototyping deals to a Special Operations Command agreement follows the same pattern, and its move into production across branches will show whether the approach scales beyond the prototype stage.
Background
Smack Technologies is a Texas-based startup founded by Marine Corps special operations veterans. Its Omega offering grew out of that operational experience, targeting joint campaign planning where commanders must connect objectives to tactics to tasks under time pressure. The Special Operations Command agreement is its latest prototyping deal, following earlier work with the Marines, the Air Force and the Navy, and the company now expects the platform to advance toward production use across the US military.
Sources: DefenseScoop: Smack SOCOM Omega deal
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