A C-130J Super Hercules has flown transport and combat missions for U.S. Special Operations Command since 2011. Soon, part of that flying may happen without a full crew: Merlin Labs announced on November 10 that it secured an $8.9 million task order from USSOCOM to move its autonomy program for the aircraft from design into system integration, according to GlobeNewswire.
The award follows Merlin's completion of both a Preliminary Design Review and a Critical Design Review for the program, the standard gates the Pentagon uses to confirm a system is mature enough to move from blueprints to hardware. This new task order funds the next phase directly: integrating Merlin's autonomy system into physical test hardware, preparing it for ground testing, pursuing cybersecurity approval and airworthiness acceptance, and tuning the flight-control software ahead of eventual flight demonstrations. The work also covers evaluating human factors and testing how the system responds to failure modes in simulation before anything flies.
What the autonomy system is actually meant to do
Merlin's system is not designed to replace the C-130J's crew outright. Instead, it is built to absorb specific workload, from managing radio traffic to handling aspects of aircraft control, so the plane can eventually operate with fewer people on board across different phases of flight. For a special operations community that often flies into contested or resource-constrained environments, cutting required crew size has direct value: fewer people exposed to risk per sortie, and more flexibility in how aircrews are allocated across a fleet.
The total indefinite-delivery contract vehicle behind this task order carries a ceiling value exceeding $100 million, meaning the $8.9 million award is one installment in a program SOCOM has structured to scale significantly if early phases succeed. That structure is common in Pentagon autonomy contracting: fund design and early integration in smaller increments, then commit larger sums once a system clears flight testing.
Part of a broader push to automate legacy airlift
Merlin's C-130J work sits inside a wider Pentagon effort to retrofit autonomy onto aircraft that were never designed for it, rather than waiting for new autonomous platforms to be built from scratch. The approach mirrors what defense-autonomy companies have pursued on other legacy airframes: bolt a software and sensor layer onto an existing, proven aircraft to reduce crew burden without the cost and schedule risk of a clean-sheet design.
The next milestones for Merlin will be ground tests validating the integrated hardware and software, followed by flight demonstrations that determine whether the system is ready for operational use. Those results, rather than this task order alone, will determine how much of that $100 million-plus ceiling SOCOM ultimately commits — and how soon reduced-crew C-130J flights move from program milestone to routine mission.