A lead House Armed Services Committee lawmaker on Thursday cited concern that the Pentagon’s new Replicator initiative to field thousands of attritable autonomous systems over the next two years could potentially result in reallocating funds away from other procurement priorities, such as critical munitions.
“Put differently, my biggest concern, particularly when we know the administration tends to prefer [research, development, test and evaluation accounts] over procurement, is that hard power programs like munitions are going to end up being bill payers for [Replicator] and I worry about that tradeoff,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), chair of HASC’s Cyber, Information Technologies and Innovation, said during a hearing on the Replicator initiative.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks first announced the Replicator initiative in late 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).
Gallagher on Thursday said he believes the Replicator concept could have been focused on taking the same rapid fielding approach but with existing long-range munitions viewed as key capabilities for potential conflicts in the Indo-Pacific, specifically citing Long-Range Anti-Ship Missiles, SM-6 missiles, Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles, Joint Direct Attack Munitions and Naval Strike Missiles.
“Something can only happen in 18 months with SecDef-level involvement and pushing the bureaucracy every single day. And if you can only focus on one thing, I would focus on long-range precision fires. That is something you could make meaningful progress with SecDef-level involvement,” Gallagher said.
Hicks last month confirmed Replicator won’t require new funding and that the department was now seeking out existing ADA2 programs that could be scaled up for production (Defense Daily, Sept. 6).
Gallagher’s panel brought three outside experts on Thursday to testify on their thoughts about Replicator, with the subcommittee chair asking the witnesses whether his concerns over reallocated funding with Replicator were valid.
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Bill Greenwalt, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, both told Gallagher they agreed with concerns that Replicator could potentially crowd out funding for priorities, such as munitions procurement.
“I agree with you. That money cannot come from Peter to pay Paul,” Clark said.
Clark added that if DoD needed to reallocate funding for Replicator, “it’s going to have to come from something that’s relatively fungible and any procurement account is a place where you can go to get that money.”
Greenwalt said the Replicator effort has potential to be a “significant game changer…but only if it’s done correctly and does not crowd out funding for near-term munitions and other critical requirements.”
“I’m not really sure yet that any of us or even the department can articulate, and with certainty, how this concept will evolve,” Greenwalt said. “Still, I think there’s enough information out there to say that deploying thousands cheap autonomous sensors, weapons, communications nodes and targets that serve as a deterrent and can complicate Chinese and other potential adversaries’ calculations in a future conflict is probably a pretty good idea.”
Greenwalt added the most important aspect out of Replicator could be DoD’s aim to “replicate the business processes necessary to eventually achieve rapid, time-based innovation and operational deployment” over a wider portfolio of capabilities.
Navy Adm. Christopher Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in September that the focus on fielding attritable autonomous systems over the next two years is only the “first instantiation” of the new Replicator initiative, with similar technology efforts to follow (Defense Daily, Sept. 13).