USMC awards $20 million contract for first autonomous ground vehicles

As the Marine Corps continues its pursuit of ground-based air defense against hostile drones and low-flying enemy aircraft, it’s making a milestone investment: a first-of-its-kind $20 million production contract for fully autonomous ground vehicles that can transport air defense systems deeper into the fight, with less human oversight.

The contract was awarded this month to Overland AI, a Seattle-based company whose autonomy stack already powers military vehicles including General Dynamics’ Small Multipurpose Equipment Transport (S-MET); the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps; Textron’s Ripsaw M5; and used by DARPA, among others

In a round table meeting with reporters on Monday, Overland co-founder and CEO Byron Boots said the Other Transaction Authority production agreement, awarded through the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, made the company the first ground autonomy provider to prime a production agreement with the U.S. military.

“Ground autonomy matters now more than ever,” Boots said. “We’re seeing the proliferation of uncrewed ground vehicles in conflicts like the one in Ukraine, and tech maturity is really there.”

Adding, “We’re registering extremely high demand from U.S. operational units who want to incorporate this technology into their concepts of operation, so in the last six months or so we’ve really seen the U.S. Army and Marine Corps lean forward into autonomy.”

Boots said Overland has participated in multiple major military exercises over the last year, providing the Army’s 173rd Airborne Corps with autonomous vehicles for breaching and resupply in exercises including Agile Spirit and African Lion. The company, he said, also provided the 82nd Airborne with autonomous ground vehicles for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance during a six-month period around a training rotation at Fort Polk, Louisiana.

“We’re registering extremely high demand from U.S. operational units who want to incorporate this technology into their concepts of operation,” Boots said.

Few details are available yet as to the model and capabilities of the systems Overland plans to provide to the Marine Corps. Announcements included images of the Overland-made ULTRA, which weighs 2,500 pounds and has a payload of about 1,000 pounds, but Boots would not confirm details.

He did say that the Corps had contracted for “about a dozen” of the vehicles, and said they would be delivered in about nine months.

Boots cited specific uses for the autonomous vehicles including resupply and ISR, but also mentioned the possibility of integrating them into the Marine Air Defense Integrated System (MADIS), a recently fielded mobile counter-drone weapon mounted on a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.

“It’s not intended to replace the JLTV,” Boots said. “We’re going to start by integrating the vehicle into the system, providing a resupply capability for the other vehicles, which are part of the system, and we may build on it from there.”

While the Marine Corps has emphasized the Pacific area of operations in its pursuit of new ground-based air defense systems, Boots said the vehicles Overland was providing were not theater-specific, and were capable of traversing “a very wide range of different terrain.” More details, he said, would be forthcoming closer to delivery of the vehicles.

“The uncrewed ground vehicle removes an operator from the proximity of whatever you’re doing, and you can imagine how useful that will be,” he said.

“The thing that we’re really excited about here is the fact that we are at a point where the U.S. military is really seeing the utility of vehicles like this and has moved beyond experimentation and prototyping to production contracts, and we’re excited to lead the way there,” Boots concluded.