Why We Build

Mechanization replaced muscle. Electrification and mass production standardized skilled work. Software absorbed structured, rules-based tasks. Now, compute and machine intelligence are extending that shift into cognition itself.

The pattern has been consistent. Work that’s predictable, repeatable, or dangerous moves from people to machines. Not all at once, and not perfectly, but always in that direction.

For decades, innovation has concentrated in air and maritime domains, where autonomy and standoff are easier to deploy. On the ground, where exposure to violence is highest, humans still shoulder the most significant physical and psychological burdens of war.

For all the advances in sensing, coordination, precision, and lethality, we still send people to drive routes that could be autonomous, to haul loads that could be unmanned, to breach obstacles that could be cleared robotically, and to recover the wounded where machines should go first. These aren’t edge cases, but the very logistics that have sustained and won wars throughout history.

And this is no less true today. Just look at recent conflicts like Ukraine. While accurately described as the first full-scale “drone war,” at its core, Ukraine is an attritional land conflict where territory is taken, cleared, and held by soldiers.

This is the dirty, dangerous layer of warfare that technology should have addressed first.

What many people don’t realize is that this mission took shape more than two decades ago, back when Forterra was known as Robotic Research. In the research-heavy phase of the early 2000s – well before the recent surge of interest in defense tech – off-road autonomy in contested environments was primarily an open research question in academia and defense R&D.

Working with pioneers in autonomy such as NIST and TARDEC, Robotic Research tested early systems across difficult off-road environments, proving the capabilities were mature enough to start the Future Combat Systems Program of Record. In 2003, they demonstrated the first platooning formation without GPS and, in 2004, validated early payload integration, firing the first Javelin anti-tank missile from an autonomous vehicle.

During that period, Robotic Research, alongside a small vanguard of researchers, built the foundational capabilities for operating without GPS or communications – work that’s since enabled a far broader set of systems and companies, and helped lay much of the groundwork for today’s autonomous systems in mining, agriculture, and defense. As the open research phase transitioned into a high-stakes commercial race, many of those early companies hit a wall, trapped in R&D land for a decade until the cash ran out. Many more were simply absorbed by larger players.

When you ask our founder, Alberto, how the early team survived that shakeout, he will point to a remarkably simple philosophy: autonomy was never treated as a concept meant for the ivory tower.

That standard is what drew Scott and me to the company. As Marines, we operated in environments where technology constantly failed us at the worst possible moments (half-working radios, brittle software, dropped communications). It’s what’s made the gap between a vendor’s promise and what they deliver highly personal to us.

Since our joining, Forterra has changed dramatically. We shed our old branding, scaled to 500+ employees and counting, raised venture capital, made acquisitions, opened new offices, and commercialized our communications platform, building out entirely new tech verticals that are independent of autonomous systems.

From the outside, it’s effectively a different company.

But the ethos Alberto and the early team instilled has not changed. Consistent performance under stress is still the only metric that matters, as a commitment to the friends we served with and the warfighters still out there.

That standard matters even more now as an unprecedented amount of capital floods the sector. The excitement, while great, brings a real risk of mission drift and a growing temptation to optimize for what funds well, demos well, or looks good on camera.

We do not believe our technology – or any technology for that matter – will ever make war easy, nor do we believe machines should replace human judgment. Most importantly, we aren’t in the business of propagating conflict. We believe the core purpose of modern military technology is to reduce human cost through deterrence (i.e., providing such a decisive, reliable advantage that the price of aggression becomes too high for any adversary to bear).

But in a world where conflict remains a grim reality, it’s unacceptable that ground operations, the most physically grueling and dangerous work in warfare, stay tethered to the past while every other sphere of human labor has evolved.

The most demanding job a society can ask of its people is carried by those men and women who put boots on foreign soil to defend our way of life. They deserve more than brittle promises. They deserve systems that don’t fail.