NORTHCOM Taps Palantir, Esri for Apps to Streamline Personnel Comms; Terrence O’Shaughnessy Quoted

The U.S. Northern Command is working with Esri, Palantir and other companies to implement applications designed to handle communications between remote military personnel and the command’s top leadership, FedScoop reported Wednesday.

Palantir and Esri, along with Apple and Monkton, are offering their technologies to address needs to securely transmit information between Gen. Terrence O’Shaughnessy, NORTHCOM’s commanding general, and his more than 700 personnel currently deployed at various health facilities.

Esri offers a platform called Survey 123 while Palantir has a mobile app designed for various functionalities such as form-filling, medical reporting and logistics.

O’Shaughnessy said at a prior webinar that NORTHCOM intends to deploy a tool that can provide updates on personnel’s physical and mental health twice a day. NORTHCOM is also aiming to implement new command-and-control practices as part of the effort, he added.

“I was concerned about how we were going to control them, how we were going to keep in touch with them,” said O'Shaughnessy. “So we went back to our technology efforts.”

The move builds on NORTHCOM and North American Aerospace Defense Command’s prior technology modernization efforts to support COVID-19 response, according to FedScoop’s report.