The Robotic Combat Vehicle effort has moved from concept to prototype phase, and the immediate question is not whether robots can be lethal. The more urgent and underappreciated question is whether they can move where soldiers need them to move, when they need to be there, and without breaking the logistical chain that must sustain them. The Army selected four teams to deliver platform prototypes for mobility testing and Soldier touchpoints under the RCV-Light rapid prototyping effort.

Those selected teams represent divergent engineering answers to identical operational demands. Textron’s Team RIPSAW emphasizes an evolutionary approach built on prior endurance runs and a modular, open-chassis concept that foregrounds transportability and payload flexibility. McQ’s WOLF-X, Oshkosh’s entry, and General Dynamics’ TRX each bring distinct choices in suspension, drive trains, and weight-to-payload ratios that will determine their real-world mobility envelopes. These vendor statements are not marketing fluff. They signal what the Army intends to stress during government mobility trials: cross-country agility, transportability, and the ability to carry mission payloads without degrading locomotion.

We should treat the RCV Campaign Plan as the program’s North Star. It laid out discrete size and transportability targets for light, medium, and heavy variants that have driven chassis decisions ever since. The light class was designed to be sufficiently compact and light to be air-transportable by rotorcraft, while the medium class sought C-130 transportability. Those constraints translate directly into mobility tradeoffs: the lighter you build a ground robot the less mass you can allocate to fuel, batteries, suspension robustness, and protection, and each of those reductions changes the vehicle’s traversability across soft soil, steep slopes, or urban rubble. Mobility testing will therefore be a contest between doctrinal requirement and engineering reality.

What will the Army’s mobility tests actually measure, and why will those measures matter? Expect assessments of maximum sustainable road and cross-country speeds, grade and slope performance, side slope and trench-crossing capability, fording and water ingress resilience, turning radius and maneuverability, ground pressure and sinkage on soft surfaces, and transportability checks against air and sea lift envelopes. Beyond pure physics, testing will include endurance runs with representative payloads and mission packages, and reliability runs to expose servicing and maintainability problems that do not appear during cursory demonstrations. These are not academic metrics. A breach of any one of them can render a promising weapons package tactically useless because the chassis cannot reach the firing point or is so fragile that it spends more time in maintenance than on mission.

Two engineering debates will dominate the test results. The first is tracks versus wheels. Tracked platforms generally win on low ground pressure and soft-terrain mobility at the cost of complexity, weight, and higher maintenance. Wheeled 8x8 solutions deliver strategic mobility, higher road speeds, and lower sustainment overhead, but they can be stopped or delayed by terrain that tracks negotiate more cleanly. The second debate concerns powertrain choices. Hybrid diesel-electric and fully electric drivetrains introduce tactical advantages such as silent mobility and instantaneous torque, but they bring penalties in battery mass, recharge logistics, and thermal management. How those penalties are accommodated within the Army’s weight and transportability constraints will be visible in mobility trials and inform whether the RCV concept can be fleet-scaled. These debates are not theoretical. They will show up in measured climb angles, sustained speeds with combat loads, and service intervals.

A test is only as useful as its operational realism. Laboratory metrics do not capture the chaos of contested maneuvers where degraded communications, GPS denial, and unexpected obstacles force vehicles to behave in semi-autonomous or degraded modes. Mobility testing that couples autonomy stressors to terrain trials will produce far more meaningful data than isolated mechanical evaluations. Equally important are Soldier touchpoints. The Army’s emphasis on Soldier feedback during this prototyping phase is sensible. Mobility is not only a function of mechanics but of interfaces. If remote operations, transport loading, casualty recovery, or field maintenance complicate human workflows, then the mobility advantage can be illusory. The prototyping contracts explicitly schedule soldier evaluations in tandem with mobility trials.

We should also expect surprises. Prototypes built to meet aggressive transportability requirements frequently hit hard limits when fitted with real sensors, weapons, and protection. A flat-deck chassis that looks nimble in the brochure can unexpectedly list toward fragility when asked to carry ISR arrays, EW packages, or remote weapon stations. Mobility testing will therefore function as reality’s editor: it will force teams to choose which capabilities to prioritize and which to defer to future growth margins. The winner in any competition will likely be the design that balances a pragmatic payload architecture with a robust mobility baseline rather than the one that promises every capability at once.

Finally, the institutional lesson is larger than mobility curves and torque charts. Mobility tests for RCVs will reveal whether military procurement and engineering cultures can square doctrinal ambition with logistical truth. Robotic systems promise to extend the reach of human warfighters, but they cannot do so if they are brittle or unaffordable to sustain. The forthcoming mobility trials will therefore be philosophical as well as technical. They will test not only chassis and suspension but the humility of designers and program managers in choosing which tradeoffs to make. If the program treats mobility testing as a checkbox exercise, it will fail to produce fieldable robots. If testing is rigorous, realistic, and soldier-centered, it can rescue the promise of the robotic wingman from the tyranny of good-looking specifications and return it to tactical usefulness.