The Department of Defense announced today it has cancelled the Army’s Future Combat Systems Brigade Combat Team program, a modernization program started in 2003. 

The restructuring eliminates the manned vehicle portion of the program, which didn’t fit with Defense’s focus on fighting counterinsurgencies in close quarters. Ground robotics, unmanned aerial drones, sensors and other modernization technologies will be handled by separate brigades, according to Defense.

Such a move had been expected since Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced military cuts in the spring.

At the RoboBusiness conference in April, retired U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Joe Dyer, president of iRobot Corp.’s government and industrial robots division, said all of iRobot’s military robots under the Future Combat Systems program would be continued.