Sen. Collins Questions Army Officials on Autonomous Vehicle Progress

Q&A on Autonomous Ground Vehicles

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Q&A on Combat Boots

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Washington, D.C. - At a hearing to review the 2027 budget request for the Army, U.S. Senator Susan Collins, Chair of the Appropriations Committee, asked the Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, and Vice Chief of Staff General Christoper LaNeve for an update on the Army's plan to develop autonomous systems to operate alongside U.S. soldiers. Sen. Collins also pressed Army officials on the Department's continued use of the combat boot exemption to the Berry Amendment, which allows troops to wear foreign-made combat boots instead of American-manufactured boots.

Q&A on Autonomous Ground Vehicles

Sen. Collins: Mr. Secretary, General, welcome. I just want to associate myself with the remarks of the Chairman and Ranking Member about Ukraine and the need for the spend plan, but also to learn the lessons from Ukraine's incredible success with counter-UAS and electronic warfare. I think that's extremely important.

I want to refer to another lesson, Mr. Secretary, from Ukraine, and that is that the need for distributed autonomous systems operating alongside soldiers has become clear. At the same time, outside analysts and defense industry reporting now suggests that the Army remains years away from fielding autonomous ground systems at an operational scale. The Army has continued to publicly emphasize that autonomy, robotics, unmanned systems, human-machine teaming, all of those are central to the future battlefield, and yet last year, as you know from our conversation, the Army made what I deemed to be a very shortsighted and unfortunate decision to cancel the Robotic Combat Vehicle Program, including the Ripsaw platform developed in the state of Maine. Where does the Army's autonomous ground vehicle strategy stand today?

Sec. Driscoll: Senator, I agree with nearly all of your remarks on the future of warfare, and one of the things the United States Army has gotten wrong for a very long time is, and this goes back to these closed systems, systems that just cannot operate, cannot share data outside of the system, and the reason that is so important is once something is in this instance drive-by-wire, we can take it and make it autonomous very quickly. And so we met a new company last year, about 14 months ago, called Applied Intuition, and they had never a single time worked with an Army vehicle, and we asked them, how long would it take to make it autonomous, and they did it in eight days.

And so, it's actually not a systematic problem within any of our future vehicles, because they're open architecture, you can layer in software to control the vehicle very quickly. It is a legacy problem of how we used to design systems and overspend, and so specifically to what you're referencing, Senator, what we canceled. The other big lesson we're learning directly from Ukraine is we, and everything we purchase, have got to be on the right end of the cost curve, because if an $800 drone can destroy a thing very quickly and easily, even as the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, we just can't sustain it. And so one of the things we're very focused on is everything we purchase going forward being closer to attritable, where we can afford it as a nation to lose it to drones.

Sen. Collins: Well, I would say that it was the height of irony that when the Army was having its parade last year of the future, what did they have in it but the Ripsaw?

Driscoll: When you made that remark, Senator, last year, I agree it was very ironic.

Sen. Collins: So, it seems to me that suggests there's a lot of value there.

Q&A on Combat Boots

Sen. Collins: Let me switch to a different issue. General, I'm going to address this to you. The Berry Amendment was enacted to ensure that American troops are wearing American-manufactured uniforms made in the USA. That was originally passed in 1941. It was permanently enacted in 1994, and we expanded it to cover athletic footwear during my time in office. So, there still is a continued exception to the Berry Amendment for combat boots that are purchased by a servicemember.

Every other major component of the uniform must be American-made, and yet we continue to allow an exception for optional combat boots. In practice, this has allowed a growing share of the market to shift to foreign manufacturers and foreign supply chains. That completely undermines the whole intent of the Berry Amendment. Why are we continuing to allow for that exception, and can we work together to close this loophole and ensure that the combat boots worn with the US military uniform are made in America?

Gen. LaNeve: Ma'am, the simple answer is yes. I commit to working with you and the team on how do we close this gap.

Sen. Collins: Thank you.