AIBRIEF
Lt. Col. John Black's 2nd Battalion, The Yorkshire Regiment ran uncrewed ground vehicles through tactical scenarios at Fort Irwin. The verdict: useful in narrow lanes, problematic in most others.
A British Army unit designated as the service's ground-robotics test bed has spent recent war games running dozens of uncrewed ground vehicles — remotely operated, not autonomous, ground platforms — through realistic tactical scenarios at Fort Irwin, the US Army's National Training Center in the Mojave Desert. Lt. Col. John Black, commander of the 2nd Battalion, The Yorkshire Regiment (2 YORKS), told Business Insider his troops have tried "any use case you can think of" with UGVs. The calibrated verdict: useful in narrow lanes, problematic in most others.
Three friction points dominated. Medium and large UGVs still need trailers or flatbed trucks to reach the fight, limiting their tactical reach. Even long-range, fast systems require a process to deploy under contact. Power remains the stubborn constraint: extra batteries, generators, or fuel depending on size and role.
The handoff is institutional: 2 YORKS is passing the experimentation role to the 1st Battalion Irish Guards, with Black's friction points now feeding the wider UK push. The government has backed uncrewed systems with more than £5 billion (roughly $6.4 billion at recent exchange rates) in funding, and the British Army has awarded ARX Robotics a UGV contract. Ukraine's battlefield UGV use in logistics runs as a parallel reference: real, but not a catch-all.
What remains unknown: which of the three friction points any successor platform will actually solve.