The U.S. Army’s Robotic Combat Vehicle effort has attracted a crowded field of industry entrants and a steady stream of prototype work since the program began, but as of September 5, 2023 the formal industrial awards landscape remained in flux. The program began as an experiment in the late 2010s and moved into prototype awards under Other Transaction Authorities. In January 2020 the Army indicated it would use OTAs to task QinetiQ North America for RCV-Light and Textron for RCV-M, marking the first tranche of government-industry prototype work.
Those early prototype efforts produced concrete hardware that the Army used during experiments. QinetiQ and Pratt Miller delivered the first RCV-L prototype to the Ground Vehicle Systems Center in November 2020, a notable milestone because it demonstrated a purpose-built hybrid-electric unmanned ground combat vehicle and provided a test bed for payload integration and autonomy experiments.
Textron and its Howe & Howe lineage have been a visible presence with the Ripsaw family. Team Ripsaw debuted the M5 at AUSA in 2019 and continued deliveries and refinements through 2021 as the company supported Army integration and Soldier experimentation for the RCV-M concept. Those vehicles have been promoted as “ready-now” platforms intended to accelerate learning for the service.
Alongside those prime examples, the market matured with multiple industrial approaches. General Dynamics Land Systems iterated on its TRX concept and showed versions publicly at events such as AUSA 2022 to illustrate payload modularity and tooling for breaching and logistics roles. Other teams have proposed wheeled hybrid solutions with transportability and growth margins in mind. The Army’s framing in 2023 emphasized a competition to select up to four vendors to deliver platform prototypes for further mobility testing and Soldier touchpoints, reflecting a deliberate move from single-vendor experiments to an industry-wide competitive phase.
A practical reader should separate two distinct things in all this coverage. First is delivered hardware and demonstrators. Those exist and have been used to shape requirements. QinetiQ’s RCV-L and Textron’s Ripsaw iterations are examples of functional demonstrators that the Army has tested and learned from.
Second is the contractual competition to turn experiments into a Program of Record. In April 2023 the Army published a Request for Prototype Proposals for Phase I that would identify up to four vendors to deliver platform prototypes. That competition was explicitly designed to evaluate design maturity and the ability to deliver prototypes that meet Army portability, modularity, and growth expectations. As of September 5, 2023 the Army’s April announcement had set the stage for Phase I selections but had not yet produced a final, program-level award that would transition RCV into production.
From a hands-on engineering perspective the technology readiness picture is mixed. Mobility and modular flat-deck designs are mature enough to produce reliable demonstrators, and companies have shown creative approaches to hybrid powertrains and payload integration. That progress is real and useful. However autonomy, mission package interoperability, cyber hardening, and sustainment in contested logistics environments are not trivial problems. Prototypes can validate many mechanical and electrical subsystems, but they often mask the lifecycle costs and the operational fragility that appear only in extended Soldier experiments and realistic contested-environment testing. Army procurement planners know this and have structured the Phase I approach to produce soldier touchpoints precisely to expose those gaps.
There is also a strategic tension that cuts across the engineering questions. Heavier, highly capable RCV variants promise payloads such as remote weapons, ISR suites, and engineering modules, but they bring cost, signature, and vulnerability tradeoffs. Cheap, attritable autonomous systems and swarms of inexpensive drones present an alternative risk calculus. That debate matters because it will shape the Army’s appetite for multi-ton robotic platforms versus a force mix that favors massed low-cost systems. Prototypes and tests will inform that calculus but will not, by themselves, settle it. This is policy as much as it is engineering.
If I were advising a fielded program at this point I would recommend three practical checkpoints. First, insist on MOSA compatible interfaces for mission packages so payloads can be swapped without vendor lock. Second, require hardening and graceful degradation modes for autonomy and communications so a vehicle can still contribute even if command links are contested. Third, stress cost-per-effect analysis in operational scenarios rather than capability-per-vehicle in vacuum. These are the dimensions where prototypes deliver the most useful answers to the Army’s real problems.
In short, by September 5, 2023 the RCV landscape showed credible demonstrators from several vendors and a formalized move toward a competitive prototype phase. The headline companies you will see discussed in press and at trade shows include legacy vehicle integrators and unmanned specialists alike, but the key point is that the program was still in its experimental and competitive prototyping phase. Real program-of-record decisions and large scale awards had not been made public by that date. The next useful milestone will be the Phase I selections and the soldier touchpoints that follow, because those events will show whether the prototypes are truly ready to move from demonstrator status to operational capability.