U.S. Special Operations Command is putting an AI campaign-planning tool built by Marine Corps special operations veterans into its prototyping pipeline, a step that could move the software toward production use across several military branches. Texas-based Smack Technologies will prototype Omega, its planning and decision-support platform for commanders, under a new Other Transaction agreement worth up to $7.5 million, CEO Andy Markoff told DefenseScoop ahead of the company's official announcement on Monday, Oct. 26.
The company's own release describes the award as "a $7.5M prototype Other Transaction (OT) agreement for Omega, Smack's AI decision platform for commanders," and ties it to "SOCOM's initiative to accelerate the application of frontier technologies into deployable warfighting capabilities across domains." DefenseScoop framed the same figure as a ceiling. GovConFeed did not locate a separate SOCOM or Defense Department release on the agreement, so the award details here come from the company and from Markoff's comments to DefenseScoop.
"Winning the next peer-level conflict will require the ability to rapidly fuse and reason over multimodal data to make informed decisions across echelons and time horizons, which is a capability that does not exist today," Markoff said in the company's announcement. He called the agreement "an important step in delivering Decision Dominance to the Joint Force."
How Omega Builds and Repairs a Campaign Plan
Omega is designed to generate courses of action for joint military campaigning. Markoff described it as a tool that links the layers of an operation, from the objective down to the individual task, so that commanders work from one connected plan rather than a stack of separate documents.
"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 told DefenseScoop 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."
That repair function is the core of the pitch: a plan built on one set of assumptions loses value once the situation shifts. Smack's site markets a recorded demonstration under the headline that Omega takes campaign planning "From Months to Minutes."
Under the hood, Markoff said, Omega runs on Smack's "suite of small, domain-specific models that leverage a hybridized algorithm approach ranging from classical planning algorithms to deep reinforcement learning." Large language models play a limited part. In the cases where a third-party LLM is used, he said, "its role is narrowly scoped, and its responses are grounded in Smack's proprietary context graph."
Why Smack Built Omega to Run Without the Cloud
Markoff laid out three design choices meant to harden Omega against adversarial AI attacks, spoofed sensor data and deliberate data poisoning.
The first is independence from the network. "First, Omega doesn't depend on constant cloud connectivity," he said. The models are small enough to run on-premises at distributed nodes. Each node operates inside a harness set by higher headquarters, solves problems locally when communications drop, and transmits data when a window opens.
The second is the pairing of deterministic, explainable classical planning algorithms with generative ones.
The third is how the models learn. "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."
For special operations forces, which routinely work in disconnected and contested environments, the offline architecture matters as much as the planning logic.
SOCOM Joins Marines, Air Force and Navy as Prototype Customers
The SOCOM agreement is not Smack's first prototype deal. DefenseScoop reported that the OTA follows prototyping contracts the company won from the Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy. In August, Smack said it was preparing for the next phase of a contract to modernize the Navy's maritime decision support and naval operational planning.
Markoff told DefenseScoop he expects Omega to move into production across multiple branches of the U.S. military in the coming months. The company has not disclosed the value of the earlier service agreements or the timeline for any production award.
The founders' background is part of the sales case. Smack was co-founded in 2024 by 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.
Where the $61M Series B Fits
The SOCOM award arrives two months after Smack closed a $61 million Series B round on Aug. 18, according to the company's PR Newswire release. Costanoa Ventures and First In led the round, with participation from Point72 Ventures, Geodesic Capital, Nomi Capital, Felicis, Scribble Ventures, Fortitude Ventures, Bloomberg Beta and Palumni VC. The release said the round "brings Smack's total capital raised to over $90 million."
That money is aimed mostly at Omega's sibling product. The release said the funding will let Smack "build the proprietary hardware necessary to deploy Alpha, its tactical AI platform, directly to the edge." Omega handles strategic planning at the command level, while Alpha extends those decisions to warfighters "operating in comms and compute constrained environments." Smack pitches the two together as a reasoning layer that runs from headquarters to the tactical edge.
Costanoa founder Greg Sands framed the investment as a bet against general-purpose models. "You can't simply fine-tune a commercial large language model, call it defense tech and expect to win a peer-level fight," he said in the release.
What It Means for Contractors
The award shows SOCOM's prototype dollars going to a narrow, purpose-built planning tool rather than a general AI platform. Firms selling decision-support software to special operations should expect evaluators to ask how a system performs with no cloud link, how it defends against poisoned data, and how much of its output a commander can trace and explain.
The OT vehicle also matters. A successful prototype Other Transaction agreement can lead to a follow-on production award without a new competition, which is why Markoff's production forecast deserves attention. If Omega moves from its Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy prototypes into production, competitors in command-and-control planning software may find the door narrowing at several customers at once.
Integrators and data providers should watch for teaming openings. A distributed, on-premises system needs hardware at the node, secure data feeds and integration with existing mission command systems. Smack's Series B is already earmarked for edge hardware, and production across multiple branches would add integration, training and sustainment work around the platform.
