The contract will go toward design and testing for prototypes of equipment for combined-arms squads. Work will be conducted in Grand Prairie, Texas and other locations throughout the U.S. and should finish by Aug. 14, 2019.

The DARPA squad-x would provide mechanized and airborne units access to real-time surveillance feeds and other technology. Currently this technology is too bulky, heavy and complex for a small unit on foot to leverage.

In 2016, DARPA had awarded Lockheed Martin a $10.6 million contract to start work on Phase II of the Squad X Core Technologies program, which is intended to deliver the kind of situational awareness available to command posts to smaller deployed units.