The Pentagon is pursuing a new initiative to produce thousands of attritable autonomous systems within the next 18 to 24 months, an effort to counter China’s continuing military build-up.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced the new “Replicator” initiative at the National Defense Industrial Association’s (NDIA) Emerging Technologies for Defense conference on Monday.
“Replicator is meant to help us overcome [China’s] biggest advantage, which is mass. More ships. More missiles,” Hicks said. “We’ll counter the [Chinese military’s] mass with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, harder to beat. With smart people, smart concepts, and smart technology, our military will be more nimble, with uplift and urgency from the commercial sector.”
Hicks noted Replicator will build on work across the department to develop attritable autonomous systems, while pushing to scale production of the capabilities she said are “less expensive, put fewer people in the line of fire, and can be changed, updated, or improved with substantially shorter lead times.”
“It’s clear they aren’t just lower-cost. They can be produced closer to the tactical edge. They can be used consistent with our principles of mission command, where we empower the lowest-possible echelons to innovate and succeed in battle. And they can serve as resilient, distributed systems, even if bandwidth is limited, intermittent, degraded or denied,” Hicks said.
Hicks will oversee Replicator along with Navy Adm. Christopher Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and will receive support from the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit, with the aim to bring in both traditional and non-traditional industry partners to work on building autonomous systems.
“To be clear, America still benefits from platforms that are large, exquisite, expensive, and few. But Replicator will galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of U.S. military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap, and many,” Hicks said.
Hicks said more specifics on Replicator will be detailed “in the coming weeks,” which is likely to shed light on funding for the initiative or how current and future autonomous system programs across the department will be incorporated into plans.
“We’ve obviously done our homework. We know we can do it. It doesn’t mean it’s without risk and we’ve got to take a big bet here. But what’s leadership without big bets and making something happen? So that’s what we’re going to do,” Hicks said. “We’re going to be cagey in terms of what we want to share, particularly with [China].”
The effort will scale production of autonomous systems across domains, which could include platforms such as drones and ground robots, with Hicks noting combatant commanders will be brought in to understand the operational challenges that could be addressed by deploying such capabilities in mass quantities.
“We’ve got a lot of work going on across the department. This is really about unifying efforts and scaling them up and getting through the pain points,” Hicks said.
Byron Callan, an analyst for Capital Alpha Partners, said in a note on the announcement that Replicator suggests the Pentagon is gathering lessons learned from the widespread use of attritable unmanned systems in Ukraine, will likely look to employ these capabilities across the military services and presents a potential opportunity to bring in “new defense tech entrants.”
David Norquist, president of NDIA and former deputy secretary of defense, offered his perspective following the announcement and said Hicks has likely already identified the programs and capabilities of interest that would be relevant to the Replicator initiative.
“[Hicks] sits at the center of the budget process. So these are the priorities of the leadership, they will be reflected in the budget that goes to the Hill. They will need the support of the Hill though. Somewhere along the line there will be funding choices and that’s where she will need them to be able to come along and support [it],” Norquist told reporters. “What she’ll need from industry is clarity as to, ‘How do I get to full production?’ Most likely the answer from industry is a contract…What I don’t know is how many of these [autonomous systems] exist already as prototypes or other forms [so] that she’s not starting from a cold start.”
Hicks said the lessons learned from Replicator could be used to inform potential future efforts to scale up production of other new emerging technologies.
When asked about how Congress can support Replicator, Hicks cited “steady and predictable appropriations” as key to ensuring success for such initiatives.
“We’re in August and there’s already talks about a [government] shutdown. That’s not good, not just for Replicator but for everything in the Defense Department. And we have become too used to working under CRs. I think that’s deeply unhealthy. And I don’t know how we compete effectively with [China] when we are in that kind of hold pattern for so long,” Hicks said.
An unclassified version of the new National Defense Strategy released in late October detailed the “pacing challenge” of China as the Pentagon’s prime focus over the more “acute threat” presented by Russia, citing Beijing as “the most comprehensive and serious challenge to U.S. national security” (Defense Daily, Oct. 27).