The Pentagon remains on track to meet its aim for fielding thousands of attritable autonomous systems between February and August 2025, a Defense Innovation Unit official said on Wednesday, noting the department may not publicly reveal all of the capabilities it’s including in the Replicator initiative.
Aditi Kumar, DIU’s deputy director for strategy, policy and national security partnerships, added that DoD has been briefing Congress on funding and acquisition strategies for the capabilities selected to be part of Replicator and that details on some specific systems could be announced after concluding those discussions.
“It is also part of this broader information strategy that I mentioned. We have to think through what parts of Replicator we want to speak about publicly and then what parts we want to reserve because that is what the operational needs mandate. And so, the department is working through those and we’ll share information at the appropriate time,” Kumar said during a Hudson Institute discussion.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks first announced the Replicator initiative last August, detailing the effort to produce thousands of “all-domain attritable autonomous systems, or ADA2 capabilities, over the next couple years “to help us overcome [China’s] biggest advantage, which is mass” (Defense Daily, Aug. 28 2023).
DIU Director Doug Beck has been tasked with supporting industry outreach efforts for Replicator as the department looks to leverage investments and existing work on ADA2 capabilities across the military services, the Strategic Capabilities Office and the combatant commands.
Hicks has previously said Replicator won’t require new funding and that the department was now seeking out existing programs that could be scaled up for production (Defense Daily, Sept. 6).
Kumar noted the goal Hicks announced in August would put DoD on a timeframe to field capabilities for Replicator between February to August 2025, confirming that “we’re on track to meet those goals.”
While DoD has not yet announced specific systems it plans to field under the Replicator initiative, Kumar reminded the audience that Hicks selected the types of capabilities the department will pursue in late December (Defense Daily, Dec. 21).
“For those capabilities, we’re currently working to identify all of the barriers to acceleration that we need to overcome to make sure that they are fielded in the hands of the warfighter in that February to August 2025 timeframe. And that will require the entire department and that is why forums like the [Defense Innovation Steering Group] (DISG) are really important, because you have everybody around the table focused on problem solving and thinking about how you get a capability from where it is today all the way into the field with all of the associated considerations around training, around sustainment, etc.” Kumar said on Wednesday.
Doug Bush, the Army’s acquisition chief, told reporters in December the service nominated three candidate systems for Replicator, which he added were unmanned systems “bigger than a quadcopter but smaller than a MQ-1 [Predator drone]” (Defense Daily, Dec. 11).
Kumar also reiterated previous comments from senior DoD officials such as Navy Adm. Christopher Grady, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that going after attritable autonomous systems is only the first instantiation of the Replicator initiative with more efforts to follow in different technology areas (Defense Daily, Sept. 13 2023).
“Replicator is about building capacity to rapidly innovate and field systems. And it is about accelerating those capabilities, pulling them to the left, sometimes by many years, so that we can deliver at a faster pace and stay ahead of the threat,” Kumar said. “We intend for there to be many instances of Replicator. Replicator is a process. It is a process for accelerating capabilities through the building.”
She added that this initial push to rapidly field attritable, autonomous capabilities has already demonstrated the “process that [DoD is] striving for” with Replicator.
“We’ve already learned lessons about how we can move faster. And the idea is now to apply that to other capabilities and portfolios so that we can do this again and again and really show that the department has the ability to move as quickly as the threat is moving,” Kumar said.