MIAMI GARDENS — The U.S. Marine Corps launched Project Dynamis on July 13, 2026, to evaluate Ditto’s peer-to-peer networking technology for maintaining AI tool functionality during military operations when cloud connectivity is unavailable. The initiative addresses a critical operational need for resilient data-sharing in contested or disconnected environments.

Project Dynamis is the Marine Corps’ contribution to the Pentagon’s joint all-domain command and control (JADC2) efforts. The program will assess Ditto’s ability to create local networks using existing hardware such as radios, cell phones, and drones, enabling data flow and localized AI processing without reliance on central servers or cloud infrastructure.

“Ditto's position is that we do not leverage a server-client model,” said Eric Hanft, Ditto senior vice president for public sector. He added, “If you continue to architect your data flows around that, you never remove this fundamental dependency that, if two edge nodes need to communicate and have to go to and from a server—and that server is not available—there's no communication.” Hanft also noted that the company can “create a peer-to-peer data mesh with no new hardware, just, you know, your consumer phones.”

Ditto was founded in 2018 to connect civilian and commercial devices when cloud connectivity vanishes. According to Hanft, the company has already conducted experiments with U.S. special operations elements and Nordic military forces, laying groundwork for its current collaboration with the Marine Corps.

Colonel Arlon Smith, director of Project Dynamis, emphasized the program’s iterative development approach. “One of the greatest strengths of Project Dynamis is in its methodology. For the last several months we’ve been in a continuous cycle of designing, testing, and refining warfighting solutions—Marines and industry engineers side-by-side—so we can find best-of-breed solutions and get them into the hands of our Marines,” he said.

The Marine Corps, established in 1775 as the maritime land force service branch of the United States Armed Forces, is adapting emerging technologies to address evolving battlefield conditions. Project Dynamis reflects a broader effort to ensure command and control resilience even as some AI developers impose limits on military use. In March 2026, OpenAI announced its military contracts would not permit powering fully autonomous weapons due to edge deployment requirements, while Anthropic has argued against battlefield use of its AI tools over concerns about data hallucination.

Why It Matters

As the Pentagon advances its JADC2 vision, maintaining data connectivity in denied or degraded environments remains a core challenge. Project Dynamis seeks to overcome this by testing decentralized networking that could keep AI-enabled decision-making functional without cloud infrastructure—a shift from traditional server-dependent architectures. The outcome could influence how U.S. forces integrate commercial technology into tactical operations while navigating constraints imposed by AI providers.