Overview
The Missile Defense Agency (MDA) is a large research, development, and acquisition agency in the U.S. Department of Defense. Their mission is to develop, rigorously test, and field reliable, state-of-the-art defenses against current and projected missile threats. These defenses include ground, sea, and space-based sensors, interceptor missiles, and command and control systems.
Business Need
Live testing and exercises of missile defense systems are costly and complex, and MDA relies on modeling and simulation to support many facets of its mission. Modeling and simulation are critical components of activities such as designing missile defense systems, defining optimal architectures and laydowns of system components, and establishing the concept of operations (CONOPS) for how those systems are used. Nearly all these simulations require accurate models and representations of threat missiles to ensure that the Missile Defense System (MDS) can succeed in its mission.
Today, MDA creates limited threat missile data using highfidelity physics-based models and simulations to satisfy minimum test coverage needs. This results in inadequate stress testing of components and architectures, sparsely defined envelopes on which to design systems or run analyses, and the inability to meet demand for the quantity or scale of threat data needed as testing requirements evolve.
The Solution
To address these challenges, C3 AI has collaborated with MDA to develop a method to deploy the C3 Agentic AI Platform and the C3 AI Parametric Threat Generative Modeling application within its secure, classified environment. They demonstrated the proof of concept with a representative threat object and are completing a full threat definition that will be available at the end of this fiscal year. With this capability, agency personnel will be able to rapidly generate large threat data packages in data-starved environments for a broad spectrum of missile defense technology initiatives. Additionally, the agency will be able to significantly accelerate developing and deploying state-of-the-art artificial intelligence techniques by leveraging the C3 Agentic AI Platform as a shared Enterprise AI toolset across development teams.
Results
The C3 AI team deployed the C3 Agentic AI Platform into MDA’s secure environment and achieved Authority to Operate (ATO) accreditation for its V8 platform. The C3 Agentic AI Platform is accredited for operational missile defense data and is globally accessible across all MDA sites with the proper connection. MDA plans to start populating the threat library in FY26 with new threat definitions for use by stakeholders in that year.
Solution Architecture

Proven results in weeks, not years
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