Deadline Date: April 28, 2026
The European Commission is driving a groundbreaking initiative to develop Multi-Domain Operations Cloud (MDOC) Services, aimed at enhancing the flexibility, mobility, and collaborative capabilities of military forces across land, air, maritime, cyber, and space domains.
Key priorities include achieving information superiority, supporting future mission management, enhancing situational awareness, improving command and control (C2) capabilities, and providing smart decision support. The initiative emphasizes interoperability through standards-based architectures, such as NATO STANAGs and Federated Mission Networking (FMN) specifications, and aims to combine existing and future multi-level community-of-interest (COI) and COI-enabling services into a federated, multi-national service mesh.
Current military operations face challenges due to siloed information systems and limited interoperability between platforms and subsystems. Vehicle-centric architectures have improved internal information sharing but have not fully bridged the gap between different systems. A cross-domain network of reconnaissance and effector system-of-systems is required to enable information sharing across all military platforms, ensuring that sensor data and operational information are accessible regardless of their origin. Multi-domain operational clouds (MDOC) are envisioned as the unifying framework to integrate multiple information spaces, providing real-time and non-real-time data services, IT security, geodata and imagery services, workflow and messaging support, and operation plan templates.
MDOC solutions must be resilient, capable of self-forming, self-healing, gracefully degrading, and maintaining redundancy, especially in contested and degraded environments. These capabilities are essential at the tactical edge, where communication networks may be narrow, disrupted, or physically compromised. The development of cloud-native architectures adapted for military use ensures that digital infrastructures remain operational even when external dependencies fail, and allows separated infrastructures to recombine and resynchronize as needed.
The aim of this initiative is to build on existing demonstrations and prototypes of multinational multi-domain cloud solutions, combining COI and COI-enabling services into a cohesive, federated service mesh. This approach supports operational agility, improves the battle rhythm, and enables more efficient collaborative warfare. The effort will focus on defining operational use cases, providing service topologies aligned with C3 taxonomy and FMN standards, delivering both hardware and software solutions at appropriate technology readiness levels, and integrating these solutions with current strategic C3 systems while ensuring compatibility with legacy tactical systems.
This call topic under the EDF-2026-DA programme, funded by the European Commission, provides an indicative budget of EUR 40,000,000 to support studies, design, system prototyping, testing, qualification, and other eligible development activities for advancing multi-domain operations cloud services.
By addressing interoperability, security, and decentralised execution challenges, this initiative will enable European military forces to achieve decision superiority, improve situational awareness, and enhance collaborative multi-domain operations across all command levels. The development of the first operational MDOC prototype represents a significant step towards a fully integrated, secure, and resilient military cloud infrastructure.
For more information, visit EC.
