Lawmakers on the Senate Armed Services Committee are tasking the Army with buying six more Robotic Combat Vehicles in fiscal year 2026 despite the service cancelling the competition two months ago in a move that committee members hope will salvage autonomous progress made by the program.
Senate authorizers have included $19 million for the RCVs under a line item for capabilities that cost less than $5 million in the procurement section of their version of the FY-26 defense policy bill, putting each additional buy around $3.2 million.
But the systems won’t make it to any Army units, a senior congressional official told Inside Defense today; the goal of using the procurement line is to get the RCVs to the Ground Combat Systems Program Executive Office and finish off its testing, evaluation and experimentation work.
“After discussing this with the Army, those six additional prototypes get them through their full RDT&E,” a senior congressional official, not authorized to speak on the record, told Inside Defense today.
That comes as the Army zeroed out its RDT&E funding for the RCV in its FY-26 budget request, according to justification books the Army posted in June.
The service would have to purchase six RIPSAW M3 prototypes from Textron Systems under the provision; before the program cancellation the Army had previously down selected the company as the sole player moving on in a competition that also included contractors General Dynamics Land Systems, McQ Inc. and Oshkosh Defense.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said last month that the price tag on the RCV didn’t justify its capability if it could be taken out by cheap drones — but that doesn’t mean the service can’t take the technology development gleaned from the competition and apply it to other autonomous programs like the XM30, according to the senior congressional official.
“After RCV goes away, we didn’t want to lose sort of the gains that we had with autonomy and remote control and all those kinds of things,” the congressional official said.
The XM30, once known as the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, is geared toward those remote-control operations. It’s the Army’s first program that’s designed virtually using digital engineering tools and has since underwent an approved milestone B decision that will lead to prototype deliveries in 2026.
Senators in their version of the defense policy bill are backing the Army’s digital engineering ambitions, as they “remain supportive” of work being done to stand up a “digital engineering center of excellence,” headed up by the Army Ground Vehicle System Center, which will afford the service “the ability to virtually and physically prototype next generation ground systems.”
“The committee believes that a digital engineering center of excellence would provide the government and its academic partners with an avenue whereby the warfighter can meet the growing threats by rapidly fielding capabilities that are both current and emerging,” the bill says.
Lawmakers will require the Army secretary to brief the congressional defense committees on the status of the service standing up the Digital Engineering Center of Excellence by Feb. 20, 2026, which should include plans for how it will harness digital engineering “across the lifecycle of its vehicles” and detail what the Army has done to take advantage of academic partners within the United States, according to the bill.
Originally published Inside Defense
