A lack of U.S. controlled territory in the massive Western Pacific Ocean region means that geography and input from allies and partners are key policy considerations for how the first set of autonomous and attritable systems acquired through the Defense Department’s Replicator Initiative will be employed and operated, the top technology adviser to the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM) said last week.
The command is also having to grapple with DoD policy around the rules of engagement for lethal and non-lethal uses of autonomous systems depending on missions and operations, Martin Lindsey, science and technology advisor to INDOPACOM, said Feb. 13 at the Defense Innovation Unit Summit in Silicon Valley.
“We have to from the beginning determine how those policies work with what we’re trying to accomplish with Replicator [and] provide a range of courses of action,” he said during a panel discussion on Replicator. “In some cases, that may result in policy rethinks of what we’re good with [and] what we’re not good with in terms of rules of engagement that we would expect to have to employ in the theater.”
Replicator 1 consists of thousands of all-domain, attritable-autonomous systems that can be produced and employed in mass by August 2025, two years after Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks outlined the initiative for a replicable process for buying systems quickly and in large numbers for use in the Indo-Pacific region with an eye to a potential conflict with China.
Asked about risks related to the fielding and sustainment of systems under Replicator 1, Lindsey said INDOPACOM is providing DoD policy, force posture, and program officials with its understanding of the risks as part of a conversation to help the command understand where it is right and wrong so that it can properly adapt.
Based on what is known about the level of autonomy with Replicator 1, INDOPACOM is comfortable in creating the “operations constructs” to use the systems and realizes it will “continue to get better” as new capabilities are added, Lindsey said. As the collaborative autonomy increases between the systems and as their ability to “operate in a complex electromagnetic spectrum environment increases in subsequent tranches, it will just make our job easier,” he said.
He also said that perfect cannot be the enemy of the good.
Still, Lindsey said the questions raised by the “massive scale” envisioned in Replicator 1 need to be answered.
“There’s not a lot of U.S. sovereign territory in the Western Pacific, so that really leads you to start thinking about allies and partners, who will get a definite vote on their involvement on, you know, what types of Replicator capability they will allow on their territories if we decide to go there, under what circumstances…for things such as access basing,” he said.
Once the command was asked to look at concepts of operation and employment based on Replicator 1 solutions, it began examining various “courses of action” related to rules of engagement and the needed support from allies and partners in the region, Lindsey said.