SAN DIEGO – While Defense Department leadership chose the first tranche of vehicles for what the Defense Innovation Unit is calling Replicator 1, officials also outlined next steps and why they are being so secretive about the specific platforms.
Last August, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks gave DIU 18 to 24 months to find mature attritable
autonomous systems to counter China’s military build-up, to be built in the thousands (Defense Daily, Aug. 28, 2023).
Hicks oversees the project with Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Christopher Grady.
On Feb. 15 Doug Beck, director of DIU, said both currently-deployed and newer capabilities have been selected for Replicator (Defense Daily, Feb. 15).
“So we’ve already burned up a quarter of our runway. And the good news is, is that DEPSECDEF and the vice chairman have selected the first tranche of Replicator systems,” Capt. Alex Campbell, Maritime Portfolio Director at DIU, said here Wednesday during the WEST 2024 conference co-hosted by the U.S. Naval Institute and AFCEA.
Campbell acknowledged while the selection and specific winners were not publicly announced he said this is deliberately secrete to surprise China in any conflict.
“Please understand that that is very deliberate. There’s a very important, frankly critical conceal and reveal strategy when it comes to Replicator. We do not want our adversaries understanding the detail of the systems that we intend to deploy 1,000s of to [Indo-Pacific Command].
He also said they understand this is frustrating to industry, but argued “those are tremendous opportunities for industry, and certainly for non-traditional defense industry work. We’re conscious of that. We want to hear from you. And we want to talk through what that is. Please understand there is a very deliberate sort of sense of what we’re going to conceal and reveal.”
This mirrors the argument made here by the commander of U.S. Pacific Fleet, Adm. Samuel Paparo, about not revealing the unmanned vessel capabilities being developed for the Pacific region (Defense Daily, Feb. 15).
He said the Pacific Fleet is experimenting with unmanned surface vessel capabilities quietly because “we don’t want to expose it to an adversary that would emplace a counter to that capability.”
Campbell noted while the first Replicator 1 projects are either in production or prototypes that can rapidly accelerate to production, DIU is also finalizing proposals for tranche 2 of Replicator 1, “which is another idea of another batch of platforms that can be accelerated to meet that 18 to 24 month timeline.”
He said DoD leaders are directing tranche 2 to also focus on software that enables the platforms to work together and “to do things effectively never seen on the battlefield before. And by that, I mean multi-platform sorties collaborating to create lethal effects, and respond to a very dynamic environment against different threats, and different adversary platforms out there.”
Campbell said the industry is ready for these kinds of procurements because of the “tremendous” amount of science and technology investment over the last 10 to 20 years in this kind of autonomous unmanned capability.
“I think we’re at a point where we can capitalize on that and capitalize on that non-traditional defense partners out there to accelerate those things into production.”
Campbell said the funding for Replicator 1 is coming from reprogramming for now, but in the long term they plan to get direct congressional funding.
He emphasized DoD conversations with Congress on these capabilities “have been overwhelmingly positive.”
Weeks ago, Hicks said the Pentagon would submit a spending plan and reprogramming requests to Congress within days for Replicator. DoD aims to start fielding these thousands of attritable systems by August 2025 (Defense Daily, Jan. 30).
The Replicator initiative also requires software and network links to help the various drones operate together but with autonomy to look for and find targets. DIU officials underscored they will keep a human in the loop for any ultimately lethal orders.
Last month, DIU issued a solicitation for affordable production-ready small Unmanned Surface Vessels that would hunt targets and explode on contact, akin to Ukraine’s program of using explosive surface vessel drones (Defense Daily, Jan. 29).
That notice wanted providers to be able to produce at least 10 vehicles per month or upward of 120 vehicles annually, starting in spring 2025.
Campbell underscored so far they have only been working on what they call Replictor 1, which focuses on the all-domain attritable autonomous systems. However, in the future Replicators 2, 3 and 4 “are meant to be top level – let’s get after the department’s hardest problems. And let’s do them quickly, and let’s do them at scale.”
This means the opportunities for Replicator projects will grow beyond what Hicks first announced.
“So I invite you to stay tuned for what those look like. And invite you to – for a very open dialogue with DIU, to understand how those opportunities are going to go.”
Justin Norman, Acting Portfolio Director/Technical Director for Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning at DIU, said the unit “often beat” the 18-24 month goal of Replicator.
He boasted that the scale of Replicator should help contractors get better feedback on their investment and will help make the financial and return on investment decisions work, even if the process is secretive.
“I think at this point, the feedback loop is coming much more quickly, and the demand signal is clear. So, you know, from an industry perspective, I think what we’re doing to make it better is to actually elevate this process and expand it even wider across a much more deliberate set of theater level and DoD level problems.”
“And so I think you’re going to continue to see…a number of solicitations that look like things that industry has perhaps already matured or solved for. We’re really looking forward to bringing that in and utilizing what we learned about accelerating the process,” Norman continued.