Army Tests Autonomous Trucks Designed to Keep Soldiers Out of Harm’s Way

The Army has awarded an 18-month contract to American Rheinmetall under Project Sustainment that will field hybrid-powered autonomous trucks to move supplies for company-sized units, keeping soldiers off some of the most dangerous resupply routes in contested environments.

Executed through the National Advanced Mobility Consortium, the award makes American Rheinmetall the prime contractor to deliver next-generation uncrewed ground vehicles.

These platforms are designed to autonomously transport supplies to and from the forward line of troops, cutting risk to soldiers while improving the efficiency of tactical sustainment.

What the Contract Delivers

Under the Project Sustainment effort, American Rheinmetall will provide hybrid-powered, autonomous uncrewed ground vehicles built to support company-sized element sustainment missions. The vehicles are intended to operate with minimal human intervention, moving critical supplies such as ammunition, fuel, water, and food across the last tactical mile without requiring a driver in the cab.

The work will take place at U.S. facilities and test ranges; The contract also carries the potential for follow-on orders as the Army continues to evolve and modernize its autonomous logistics fleet.

The program emphasizes three practical advances: greater autonomy so the vehicles can navigate and complete missions with less oversight, commercial technology that can be adapted quickly, and hybrid power that supports longer endurance and lower signatures. A key feature is voice control, which lets soldiers interact with the systems using natural language rather than complex interfaces.

The Team Behind the Vehicles

American Rheinmetall is leading a team that includes Harbinger, Forterra, and Primordial Labs.

Harbinger brings commercial vehicle and technology expertise. Its hybrid platform serves as the foundation for the uncrewed logistics vehicle, offering a dual-use chassis that can be adapted for military requirements and scaled for production.

Forterra supplies the autonomy software that enables distributed, mission-aware operations in contested environments. The goal is vehicles that can operate with minimal human input while remaining resilient when communications or GPS are degraded.

Primordial Labs’ contribution is the Anura human-machine interface. The system converts a commander’s intent into natural language commands that the vehicles can understand. According to the company, Anura is designed to scale the number of robots one soldier can oversee, cut the cognitive load of managing multiple systems, shorten training time, and allow heads-up, hands-free operation.

Why This Matters for Soldiers

Resupply has always carried risk. In recent conflicts, that risk has grown sharper as drones, loitering munitions, and precision fires have made traditional logistics convoys high-value targets. Soldiers driving trucks loaded with fuel or ammunition along roads within range of enemy sensors face threats that can appear with little warning.

Project Sustainment aims to remove soldiers from those high-risk delivery routes while still getting essential supplies to the tactical edge. By shifting the most exposed legs of the supply chain to autonomous vehicles, the Army reduces the number of troops who must physically move through contested areas just to keep units fed, fueled, and fighting.

The voice-control feature is intended to make the systems practical for troops who already carry a heavy cognitive load. Instead of mastering specialized software or joysticks under stress, soldiers can issue spoken commands.

That design choice is consistent with efforts across all the services to treat unmanned systems as true teammates rather than complex tools that demand extra attention, similar to how the Marine Corps has moved to standardize robotics training across the force and how other programs have paired artificial intelligence with familiar weapons systems.

Reducing the burden on soldiers is an eternal struggle that military leaders consistently try to solve. Every soldier who does not have to drive a resupply run is available for other tasks. Every autonomous trip that succeeds without a human in the vehicle is one less opportunity for an ambush or drone strike to produce casualties.

In a fight where logistics often determines who can sustain the initiative, that difference can matter. Recent moves to integrate AI-enabled systems that turn existing machine guns into drone killers show the same logic: use automation to take risk and cognitive load off the individual while keeping the human in the decision loop.

Part of a Larger Push

The Army has been testing autonomous logistics concepts for years, including ship-to-shore resupply demonstrations and various uncrewed ground vehicle prototypes.

Project Sustainment is one of several efforts under the Capability Program Executive Mission Autonomy portfolio aimed at fielding medium-sized ground robots that can handle tactical logistics without putting soldiers in the driver’s seat.

American Rheinmetall’s award is one of multiple selections the Army has made for the program. Other companies are also developing competing or complementary prototypes. The service plans to move successful designs toward operational testing with units in the coming years, with the longer-term goal of building a more resilient autonomous logistics fleet that can operate under fire.

For soldiers on the ground, the practical test will be whether these vehicles can reliably complete missions when communications are jammed, terrain is difficult, and the threat is real.

The hybrid power system, commercial chassis, and voice interface are all intended to make that outcome more likely. If the prototypes perform as designed, the next step will be scaling the capability so that company-level units have a genuine alternative to manned resupply runs when the situation demands it.

The contract reinforces a simple operational truth: the most dangerous jobs on the battlefield are often the ones that keep the force supplied. Giving those jobs to machines that can take the risk, while leaving the decision-making and oversight with soldiers, is the core promise of Project Sustainment.