Robots—from autonomous to remotely operated—are everywhere on today’s battlefields. Yet on the ground, autonomy is just recently crossing from experiment to fielded capability. The Army has a short 12- to 18-month window to develop autonomous capabilities and field them at scale. Fielding and scaling quickly will posture the Army for the next two to five years as lessons from Ukraine, where the massing of autonomous systems, mines, electronic warfare and relentless tempo, are forcing change.

Continuous transformation is the vehicle for that change: rapid, soldier-led trials with the potential to turn prototypes into tactical advantages, and near-term fielding into updates to Doctrine, Organization, Training, Materiel, Leadership and Education, Personnel, Facilities and Policy, or DOTMLPF-P. If unmanned aircraft went from niche to ubiquitous from the platoon to division levels between 2022 and 2024, rising from 800,000 in 2023 and 2 million in 2024 in Ukraine, ground autonomy sits at a similar inflection point. The question isn’t if ground robots join our formations, but how fast and to what effect on lethality, survivability and sustainment.

While integrating ground autonomy into Army operations will involve a cultural shift, Americans already live alongside ground robots. Driverless ride-hail vehicles operate in major cities, ports move containers with automated guided vehicles, dozens of university campuses use small sidewalk robots for daily food deliveries. These succeed because they run in structured environments with lanes, signals, mapped routes and predictable patterns. Large-scale combat is the opposite: unstructured, off-road,
adversarial and dynamic. That’s why continuous transformation leans on soldier-led trials to translate concepts that work in civilian life into survivable, fieldable capability for the ground fight.

Fortunately, the Army has begun to explore ways to integrate ground autonomy into operations through a series of demonstrations and experiments. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency program has pushed high-speed, off-road autonomy in realistic terrain and provided lessons-learned to the services. The Army has hosted Project Convergence at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, the Maneuver Support and Protection Integration eXperiment at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, and xTech competitions, among others. Together, these venues put prototypes in soldiers’ hands under field conditions, not just on instrumented test lanes, so leaders can harvest data and gather operator feedback to make near-term fielding decisions.

These experiments also expose a gap in the Army’s capability development process. That is, tactical units don’t retain systems long enough to train, reset and retrial through the full eight-step training model. Closing that gap will require extended loaners and recurring unit rotations, at home stations and with forward-deployed formations, to move from demo to doctrine.

Two recent unit-level trials show what this could look like in practice: a combined-arms breaching effort with the 36th Engineer Brigade at Fort Hood, Texas, and a resupply use case with the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Europe.

Lt. Gen. Kevin Admiral, commander of III Armored Corps, tasked the 36th Engineer Brigade to experiment with autonomous systems and available technology to conduct one of the most difficult combat operations—a combined arms breach, where artillery, infantry, armored and engineer units synchronize their efforts to break through an enemy defensive belt. Supported by the 1st Cavalry Division, the engineers used autonomous ground systems to identify routes and communicate information back to command posts. Most significantly, the engineers and industry experts used autonomous tracked vehicles, pulling a Mine Clearing Line Charge trailer, to position and remotely fire a live line charge and successfully open a lane within a complex obstacle belt for follow-on forces.

Technology’s Reach

The exercise highlighted that autonomous ground systems could identify routes through integrated obstacles, navigate to a breach point and enable a successful breach without putting soldiers in harm’s way. It also revealed that more work must be done when considering protection of autonomous vehicles from enemy fire and electronic warfare.

Overall, “the effort proved how technology can extend the reach of the engineer on the battlefield, executing one of our most dangerous tasks without putting soldiers in harm’s way,” said 1st Lt. Jacob Nelson of the 59th Combat Engineer Company.

In Europe, the 173rd Airborne Brigade used Exercise Agile Spirit in Georgia to experiment with a ground autonomous system to support resupply at a mobile mortar firing point. Paratroopers used an ULTRA ground autonomous system to conduct Class I (rations) and III (fuel) resupply during the training, which minimized their exposure in a contested environment.

 Paratroopers were able to track their vehicle along its designated route and monitor supply loading and unloading using onboard cameras while remaining in dispersed locations. This reduced the soldiers’ exposure in a contested environment. As Spc. Jack Padberg of 1st Squadron, 91st Cavalry Regiment’s mortar platoon said, “Anytime you’re mobile, you’re not camouflaged. You’re a lot easier to spot, especially from the air.”

Accepting Risk

Ground autonomy’s near-term value aligns to missions where autonomous ground systems can absorb initial risk and buy time for leaders. According to a March 2025 Defense One article, Gen. James Rainey, then-commander of U.S. Army Futures Command, told a defense conference the goal is to “send a robot out to clear a building or lay a line charge to detonate an obstacle,” not to replace soldiers, but to take them out of the most dangerous first minutes or even hours. The Army requires intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; logistics; force protection and fires and effects platforms at echelon to maintain operational overmatch. Priority-use cases follow naturally:

• Breaching reduces exposure at the obstacle and shaves minutes off timelines.
• Recon/route clearance provides an autonomous point man to map, mark and flag choke points or electronic warfare hot spots.
• Resupply to push water, ammo, food or Class IV (equipment and materials) without burning out units on supply routes.
• Casualty evacuation without exposing other soldiers.
• Retrans/relay keeping command and control and fires connected under jamming with a mobile mesh node or offsetting the electronic warfare signature. 

For commanders, especially at the battalion and brigade levels, incorporating ground autonomous systems reduces tactical risk, increases tempo and offers potential to scale operations without growing human force structure. The more technology remains in the hands of warfighters, while testing it in realistic wartime conditions, the better the Army will innovate, improve performance and become comfortable using new systems.

Ground autonomous systems provide opportunities for commanders and soldiers to creatively incorporate new tactics and technologies into their formations and operations. However, there are challenges beyond acquisition reform measures undertaken by the secretary of the Army and chief of staff.

Trust is the first hurdle for many commanders, NCOs and soldiers. They still are learning when and how these systems can fully perform the mission successfully or train safely due to their novelty. As with any new technology or capability, repetition and time as part of the eight-step training model will normalize employment.

The second challenge is prioritizing tests and experiments to determine how autonomous systems will fit across the DOTMLPF-P while balancing traditional Mission Essential Task List tasks and directed missions. Leaders need cost-benefit analysis to determine where to take risks with funding, time, ammunition and maintenance to adopt new tools and tactics without impacting necessary readiness. Brigade and division commanders can maintain ground autonomy platforms with enough time to experiment at scale while at the same time making acceptable risk decisions.

Finally, unit interfaces with industry partners and the Army enterprise (such as U.S. Army Test and Evaluation Command, Army Applications Laboratory and U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command) still are unfamiliar to many combat formations. Close ties can accelerate learning, innovation and fielding.

These challenges are solvable, and addressing them is how the Army turns promising ground autonomy demonstrations into routine capability in operational formations.

Changing Battlefield

As the Army integrates ground autonomous systems into formations, the DOTMLPF-P framework must be considered, especially doctrine, training and leadership. This mirrors the cultural and doctrinal pivot of AirLand Battle in the 1980s, when the Army reoriented to fight with greater depth, agility and synchronization to meet the demands of the changing battlefield. That shift coincided with the fielding of the Big Five platforms: the M1 Abrams tank, M2/M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle, AH-64 Apache helicopter, UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter and Patriot air defense missile system to redefine how the Army fights.

Success depended as much on mindset and practice as on hardware. Likewise, today, integrating ground autonomy will involve new platforms and a transformation in the way the Army leads, trains and writes doctrine. Focusing on these will help the Army determine the optimal ways to begin incorporating ground autonomy into formations.

To meet modernization goals, units should tailor collective training and warfighter exercises to include an emerging ground-autonomy system, letting commanders and soldiers experiment with new tactics, techniques and procedures and provide direct feedback to industry. Training should be rigorous at home stations then refined at the combat training centers. Bottom-up learning is critical as soldier after-action reviews can refine the tech, shape near-term fielding decisions and accelerate iteration.

Leaders also must foster a culture of experimentation aligned to continuous transformation and the Army Transformation Initiative, encouraging formations to test new ways to execute core missions. Agile leaders and repeated reps will normalize employment, making the force better suited to fight and win on the modern battlefield.

Off-road ground autonomy is no longer a science project; it’s a near-term combat multiplier. The Army’s transforming in contact approach, soldier-led trials, repeated reps and rapid fielding can convert promising demonstrations into routine, trusted capability. The next 12 to 24 months should focus on recurring unit rotations with extended use platforms, standardized evaluation metrics and DOTMLPF-P updates that codify what works.

If unmanned aircraft leapt from niche to ubiquitous in two years, ground autonomy can do the same, provided commanders resource the reps, enforce and measure what matters. It’s not if, but how fast, and to what effect on lethality, survivability and sustainment, ground systems will have on combat.

Capt. Jack Young is the brigade training officer for innovation for the 36th Engineer Brigade, III Armored Corps, Fort Hood, Texas. Over the past year, he has spearheaded the Machine Assisted Rugged Soldier (MARS) initiative working toward an autonomous armored breach package. He is a 2019 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, New York.

Col. David Rowland, U.S. Army retired, has served numerous deployments worldwide. He is the author of Green Light, Go!: The Story of an Army Start Up.