Forterra reveals lessons from 1,400 Lancer missions in Ukraine

Forterra says well over a thousand missions in Ukraine have shaped how it builds autonomous ground vehicles, from coping with jamming and mud to keeping them running under constant threat from Russian drones.

The company develops autonomy systems for military vehicles. Its Lancer is a Polaris Ranger 1500 utility vehicle fitted with Forterra’s AutoDrive self-driving software and Vektor communications system. Forterra delivered more than a hundred Lancers to Ukrainian forces under a U.S. government program, a deployment it first disclosed in July. Ukrainian troops use them for supply runs, casualty evacuation and other frontline tasks.

In written answers to questions from The Defence Blog, Forterra said running more than 100 vehicles in combat has taught it more about durability, supply chains and field maintenance than any test range could.

The company’s full answers appear below, unedited.

Q: Forterra has now accumulated experience from more than 1,400 Lancer missions in Ukraine. Looking beyond the mission count itself, what have been the most important lessons from operating autonomous ground vehicles in an active, contested battlefield?

A: A few things stand out for us at Forterra. Electronic warfare changes constantly. A solution that works one month may not work the next, so the system has to be updated quickly. That requires trust and good operational communication with the unit executing missions. We’ve built our comms and autonomy stack in a way that can be updated and adapted remotely, and often in near real time. So being able to iterate rapidly from a remote location is just as important as the hardware itself.

Terrain has been another major lesson. It is difficult to reproduce the combination of mud, poor traction, improvised routes, and recovery challenges in testing. In Ukraine, the best results have come from combining autonomy with human judgment. That experience is shaping how we design the next generation.

We’ve also learned that just because a vehicle can operate fully autonomously, there are times soldiers want to be in control. The troops in Ukraine choose to teleoperate the Lancers when reacting to an immediate threat. Our Lancers were designed to assist and support the troops in the best way they see fit, and when it comes to contested environments such as the ones they’re facing in Ukraine, autonomy combined with human judgment will like result in the greatest success, and it’s shaping how we design the next generation of the system.

And ultimately, reliability at scale matters more than any single capability. Keeping over a hundred vehicles running, maintained, and mission-ready for as long as we have, under combat conditions, has taught us more about durability, supply chains, and field maintenance than any test range ever could.

Photo courtesy of Forterra

Q: What did Ukrainian operators teach Forterra about the system that the company could not have learned through testing in the United States? Were there assumptions made during development that had to be reconsidered once Lancer entered combat operations?

A: Testing can reproduce rough terrain, jamming, or a mechanical failure. It cannot fully reproduce the urgency, pressure, and improvisation involved in making those decisions under fire.

Operators constantly find practical fixes in the field. Operators would add armor plating or reflective tape with whatever they had on hand, faster than we could respond to one of their requests, and we’ve had to build our process to absorb that kind of frontline fix. This is something the US misses in each of its programmatic efforts. It underutilizes operational assessments where this ingenuity emerges and presses the government and industry teams forward with new solutions.

Trust in autonomy is earned incrementally. Soldiers wanted to retain control in certain situations and that has reshaped how we think about the balance between autonomous and remotely piloted modes. Ukraine’s electronic warfare environment also pushed us to accelerate work on resilient communications and made clear that maintainability has to be a core design requirement.

Q: Ukraine presents an unusually difficult environment for autonomous systems, with electronic warfare, disrupted communications, GNSS interference, drones, mines and rapidly changing front lines. Which of these challenges has been the hardest for Lancer and its autonomy stack to deal with?

A: The pervasive drone threat has been a challenge. There is a lot of surveillance and the coordination of these vehicles under near persistent observation means human judgment for when to move and when to pause is critical.

So, on a go forward basis looking at how this context of the battlefield, in a comms restricted environment, gets to operators and assets is critical. The information exists, the automated behaviors are in work.

Q: Forterra has acknowledged that some Lancer vehicles have been lost to Russian drones. What have those losses taught you about survivability, signature management, redundancy and the way unmanned ground vehicles should be designed for a battlefield saturated with UAVs?

A: We have lost Lancers. They demonstrate the value of using unmanned systems for missions that would otherwise resulted in a loss of life. Some of these assets have been resurrected and repaired. The thoughts around sustainment and reconstitution on the edge are important.

I think there is room for automated defensive measures which have proved to be effective. This seems like a natural next step.

Photo courtesy of Forterra

Q: Has combat experience in Ukraine already resulted in hardware or software changes to Lancer, AutoDrive or Vektor? Can you give examples of improvements that originated directly from feedback from Ukrainian units?

A: Yes. This program has been able to move fast because we’ve treated frontline feedback as a direct input to engineering. Integrating Starlink into our comms architecture was a direct response to the environment. It gave operators another way to maintain connectivity to assets executing missions.

Another example is with our mobility capability AutoDrive. We’ve been able to push updates to AutoDrive around terrain handling, traction, and recovery behavior based directly on where and how vehicles were getting stuck in the field.

More broadly, the feedback we get and our ability to push these updates remotely in response has been one of the biggest benefits of this deployment.

Q: How quickly does that feedback loop work in practice? When Ukrainian operators identify a problem or new requirement, how does that information move from the battlefield back to Forterra and eventually into a software update, design modification or production change?

A: We have deliberately kept the feedback loop short. We treat the front line as a live input to engineering, not a lagging indicator. Operators flag an issue directly through the units and program touchpoints we have in place, and it gets to our engineering team almost immediately. For software, that often means a fix or update pushed remotely within days. For hardware or production changes, it is much faster than typical defense programs.

Q: Ukraine has become an operational environment for unmanned technologies on a scale and with a technological intensity that is difficult to reproduce elsewhere. From an engineering perspective, how has exposure to this environment changed Forterra’s understanding of what future ground autonomy needs to look like?

The biggest shift has been recognizing that autonomy is not a standalone capability. A vehicle can be great at driving itself and still fail the mission if it can’t handle jamming, can’t be fixed in the field, or can’t be updated fast enough to keep pace with new threats.

We believe that “good autonomy” is less about maximizing autonomous capability for its own sake, and more about knowing where autonomy helps and where human control still matters. Ukraine has made that split much clearer than any test range could.

It’s also changed our sense of pace. Traditional defense development cycles measure in years but this engagement demands fixes in days. Any future ground autonomy platform has to be built for that kind of iteration from day one. Future systems need to be designed as complete operational systems – from autonomy and communications to logistics, maintenance, human controls, and rapid updates.

Q: If Forterra were starting the Lancer program again today with everything the company has learned from Ukraine, what would you design differently from the beginning?

A: The core architecture has held up: a proven commercial platform with modular autonomy and communications. If we were starting again, I’d prioritize field maintenance and local supply chains, recovery, communications resilience, and operator control even earlier in the design process.