WASHINGTON — The Marine Corps today awarded autonomous trucking company Kodiak AI a contract to integrate its AI-powered autonomous driving system into Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTVs) for the service’s Remotely Operated Ground Unit for Expeditionary (ROGUE) Fires platform.
“By integrating the Kodiak Driver into the ROGUE-Fires platform, Kodiak is enabling the U.S. Marine Corps to understand how autonomous operations can extend reach, improve operational tempo, and reduce risk to Marines while executing high-end expeditionary missions,” the company wrote in a statement today.
The ROGUE Fires platform consists of mounting the Navy Marine Expeditionary Ship Interdiction System (NMESIS) — a ground-based anti-ship missile launcher with two Naval Strike Missiles — onto the JLTV chassis.
“The Kodiak Driver is a powerful dual-use capability that leverages physical AI to strengthen defense readiness through scalable and adaptive applications in order to keep Marines out of harm’s way,” Kodiak AI Founder and CEO Don Burnette said in today’s release.
“We have extensively tested our autonomous system in our prior efforts with the military and believe this work with the Marine Corps allows us to further showcase how Kodiak’s technology performs in unstructured and unmapped environments,” he continued.
Kodiak’s announcement comes after Forterra, another autonomy company specializing in “driverless technology,” was awarded a contract in January 2025 to integrate its autonomy stack, dubbed AutoDrive, into the JLTVs for the ROGUE Fires platform. (Oshkosh Defense is currently on contract to provide the JLTVs).
“Fielding self-driving ground autonomy on ROGUE-Fires is crucial to the Marines’ modernization plans and Forterra is proud to partner with Oshkosh Defense on a system that will reduce casualties and improve our warfighters’ ability to fight and win,” Christian Seifert, head of Robotic Missile Systems at Forterra, said in a company statement at the time of the award.
Kodiak declined to comment on the value of the ROGUE contract, but Breaking Defense previously reported that the Marines invested $30 million into putting autonomous navigation into the ROGUE Fires platform through Forterra’s AutoDrive system. Further, Congress shelled out $59 million for “autonomy kits” for the program for fiscal 2026, $30 million more than what the Pentagon’s 2026 budget request laid out.
Prior to today’s announcement, Kodiak was also awarded a contract in 2022 for the Army’s first shot at its Robotic Combat Vehicle (RCV) program, for which the company said it received $30 million. The RCV program has since been cancelled and revamped — for a second time — by the Army as the service attempts to find less expensive solutions, capping the per-unit cost at $650,000.