When it comes to wide adoption of ground robots, the U.S. military is starting to walk the road pioneered by Ukraine.
The Pentagon isn’t yet close to buying unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, at Ukrainian scale. The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense says it ordered more than 22,000 in the first seven months of this year, which is about as many as it ordered in all of 2025. But the U.S. Defense Department committed more than $115 million to UGV projects in fiscal 2026, per public records and GovTribe, a Defense One sister brand that tracks government contracts.
Still, the number of ground robots on Ukrainian battlefields is dwarfed by that of aerial drones. In 2025, Ukraine made some 4 million quadcopters and other flying drones, and ministry officials say 2026 deliveries are moving 3.7 times faster. Russia is also producing armed drones faster, and both sides’ increasing ability to target anything that moves on the battlefield has spurred manufacturers to keep their UGV designs relatively small and cheap.
“What Ukraine says they need, and obviously it’s the same for the Russians, more or less, is something that’s not very expensive, something that is attritable, something that if lost could be easily replaced,” Samuel Bendett, a drone analyst at CNA, CNAS, and CSIS, said in an interview. “These are not overly complicated UGVs. They’re relatively simple. They have a lot of commercial components.”
Ukraine’s UGVs are often used for logistics, casualty evacuation and related duties. Its TERMIT UGV can carry up to 300 kg of supplies or wounded soldiers. But increasingly, they are being armed for combat. In the summer of 2025, Ukraine used a Droid TW 12.7 UGV armed with a .50-caliber machine gun to defend a key intersection from repeated attacks, Defense One reported earlier this year. Russia employs similar vehicles, one of which was used as an explosive kamikaze as early as November 2024.
The U.S. military, which envisions fighting in a wider range of environments than does Kyiv, has more diverse UGV projects under development. Last month, for example, the Marine Corps converted an artillery unit into its first Navy-Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System, or NMESIS, battalion. NMESIS uses UGVs equipped to fire two Naval Strike Missiles at ground and naval targets more than 100 nautical miles away. The system is intended for use in sea-denial missions in the Pacific. It uses a modified Oshkosh Joint Light Tactical Vehicle with autonomy packages provided by Forterra and Kodiak AI. The program is part of roughly $92 million in USMC ROGUE Fires orders this year.
Meanwhile, the Marines and the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment are spending nearly $25 million to buy more than a dozen IBEX UGVs made by Overland AI for logistics and counter-UAV defense missions, company officials said last month. The company also received two contract awards totaling more than $34 million for autonomous breaching capabilities in August and September.
Compared to Ukraine’s focus on cheap, attritable systems which are typically remote-controlled, the U.S. ecosystem, with the affordances of peacetime research and development, is shooting for more capable autonomous UGVs.
“Soldiers train for and are expected to complete the mission in these types of environments, cut off from consistent communications and data networks,” Byron Boots, Overland AI’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Overland AI believes that autonomous systems should be held to the same standard.”
Time will tell which approach proves more successful.
