Introducing Project Conexus: the unified targeting operating system for NATO warfighters

At the Oracle Defence Summit in Brussels on June 25th, Whitespace and its consortium partners introduced Project Conexus - a concept demonstrator for a unified, cloud-centric targeting operating system for alliances, developed first on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Conexus brings sensing, intelligence, decision-making and effect together in a single environment.

Modern defence does not have an intelligence problem. It has a connection problem. The data, the sensors, the platforms, the AI models and the operational systems already exist, often in abundance. What remains stubbornly hard is connecting them so that the distance between information, understanding, decision and impact is measured in seconds rather than hours. That gap is where advantage is won or lost. 

Project Conexus is our answer to it.

A problem recognised independently

We did not arrive at this conclusion from theory. The need was identified through Whitespace’s and our partners’ own operational experience.  The recurring, practical difficulty of connecting what already exists. So it was striking to see a paper published recently, and quite separately, by the NATO Command and Control Centre of Excellence, enhancing Military Decision Making with Generative AI, reach much the same conclusion from an entirely independent vantage point: that decision advantage, making better decisions, faster, than an adversary, increasingly depends on fusing information across domains and classification levels and turning it into insight at the speed of relevance, structured around the familiar observe-orient-decide-act cycle, interoperable across coalition partners, and with the commander’s judgement kept firmly at the centre. We take that coincidence of thinking as welcome, independent corroboration of the problem Project Conexus sets out to solve; not of our answer to it, which is for the defence community to judge.

A common foundation for defence

The name is deliberate. Conexus is Latin for joined together, from connectere, to bind. That is precisely the problem we set out to solve.

Consider the role that iOS and Android play in the commercial world: a common, open foundation on which trusted applications run, data flows, and capability evolves, without every new tool having to be rebuilt from scratch. Defence has had no equivalent. Conexus is designed to be that foundation - a cloud-centric operating system for alliance targeting, built on open standards, providing a secure and scalable base on which trusted Whitespace-built and third-party applications can be integrated, managed and improved over their lifecycle, while preserving interoperability across defence and allied systems.

Built on Whitespace’s Collective operating system, Conexus is engineered to do for defence capability delivery what an operating system does for an app ecosystem: lower the barrier to integration, accelerate innovation, and let new capability reach the operator at the speed modern conflict demands. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is the first environment in which Conexus has been stood up, providing a secure and resilient foundation for the demonstrator. But the test that matters is the warfighter’s: Conexus has to be available to them when, where and how they need it.  

A higher bar than any single environment can meet. Coalition operations span many nations, networks and classification levels, and rarely sit in one place. Built on open standards, Conexus is therefore designed to deploy into any cloud or edge infrastructure, at every classification, as the mission requires.

One environment, from headquarters to the tactical edge

For the operator, Conexus delivers a single pane of glass - one consistent, intuitive environment through which to reach applications, intelligence and targeting workflows. Behind that interface sits an integrated data platform that fuses information from across sensors, systems and mission applications, drawing on enterprise-grade technology including the Oracle data platform to turn that fusion into real-time insight and operational awareness.

In short, it mirrors the decision cycle itself - bringing sensing, decision and effect into one place rather than bolting them together after the fact. And it is built to keep the commander in command: Conexus is designed to sharpen human judgement and accelerate the decision cycle, not to replace the people accountable for it.

Crucially, it is built for the conditions operations actually face. Conexus is designed to scale from strategic headquarters to small tactical teams, and to hold up across connected, disconnected and intermittently connected environments. Resilient data synchronisation and replication keep distributed teams consistent and current even when the network is not, so capability follows the mission, rather than the other way around. And it is evergreen by design. Rather than ageing the moment it is fielded, the platform evolves continuously through secure updates, ensuring the defence community benefits from the latest capability without disrupting operations.

An industry-led response to a recognised need

No single organisation holds every part of this picture, and rather than wait for a requirement to be written, industry has chosen to move first. Project Conexus is the product of partners who saw a shared and pressing need through their own work, and came together to develop a response collectively. Whitespace leads that effort.

“Project Conexus exists because our partners chose to act. Rather than wait for the requirement to be written, we brought together some of the best of industry - each contributing what it does best - to demonstrate what a genuinely connected operating environment makes possible. That is how the hardest problems in defence get solved: collaboratively, in the open, and at pace. This is a starting point, not a finished article, and the consortium remains open to those who want to help build it.” Andrew Webber, Chief Partnerships Officer, Whitespace

The founding consortium brings together Oracle, Mattermost, Arqit, Quantum Systems, Janes and Esri, spanning sensing, geospatial, open-source intelligence, secure connectivity, collaboration and cloud, integrated into one coherent operating environment. It is, by design, an open and growing community: as the concept matures, further industry partners will join, broadening the capability the platform can host and the missions it can support.

That collaborative, open-standards model is the point. Fragmented systems produce fragmented decisions. By building around a shared operating model rather than a collection of disconnected tools, the consortium demonstrates how industry can enable seamless multi-classification data flow, support genuine alliance interoperability, and accelerate the delivery of capability to the front line - at its own initiative, and at pace.

‍A first test with those it is built to serve

The Oracle Defence Summit is where Conexus meets its first audience. Brussels marks the first opportunity to put the concept in front of defence ministries and allied partners, a deliberate test of the thinking with the very community it is designed to serve, and an open invitation to shape where it goes next.

Project Conexus is a demonstrator, not an endpoint. It is a deliberate, industry-led step towards a future in which defence and its allies operate from a common, connected foundation, one that compresses the time between information and impact, and gives commanders the decisive information advantage to operate at the speed of modern conflict.

We are proud to lead it, grateful to the partners building it with us, and clear on the work still ahead. The consortium is open, and the conversation is beginning.

If the connection problem is one you are working to solve, we would welcome the chance to talk.