The Pentagon said that it would choose contenders for Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks’ Replicator initiative this week, but DoD has not released those candidates yet.
“We remain on plan, with the deputy secretary of defense approving recommendations this week,” Eric Pahon, a spokesman for Hicks, wrote in a Dec. 19 email.
Defense Daily has reached out to staffers on Capitol Hill, think tank analysts, and industry representatives and received no responses on which companies DoD has picked.
Hicks told reporters last month that DoD would be “transparent” with Congress on the Replicator picks but suggested that publicizing those candidates would jeopardize the operational security of the initiative (Defense Daily, Nov. 21).
“I would not necessarily say the candidates will be announced,” she told the Defense Writers Group on Nov. 21. “We’re being very careful, as you know, about the way in which we talk about Replicator. Our goal here is an operational goal, which is, in addition to [shortening] the acquisition cycle, and that operational goal is to create dilemmas for China and any other competitor who might look at this approach and try to undermine it. We will be very clear and transparent with Congress. I’ve talked to Congress in classified sessions on this, but how we choose to speak about it, in terms of the particular programs or projects that we’ll be accelerating through Replicator, is to be determined.”
Hicks and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin have visited Silicon Valley companies this month to discuss Replicator.
One of those companies, San Mateo, Calif.-based Skydio, a unicorn drone startup, said on Dec. 13, a day after Hicks’ visit to the company, that “we fully support the Replicator vision as described by Dr. Hicks and we are excited to continue building on our partnership with DoD.”
“As a dual-use company manufacturing at scale to meet the needs of our commercial and defense customers, we are uniquely prepared to answer Replicator’s call,” wrote W. Mark Valentine, president of the company’s global government business. “To this end, we have recently expanded our manufacturing capacity by a factor of 10, enabling us to significantly increase the amount of drones that we can produce per month.”
While Russia has countered Ukraine’s drones with electronic warfare (EW), Valentine has written that “smart drones are the antidote to EW, and AI [artificial intelligence] and autonomy are integral parts of Skydio’s technology which answers this call.”
Deciding which missions Replicator drones will handle and the concept of operations for those missions will be key.
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told the House Armed Services Committee’s Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems panel on Oct. 19 that the Air Force could use drones “to conduct stand-in electronic warfare (EW) jamming rather than expecting them to evade threats and deliver weapons into highly-contested areas” and that such use of available, autonomous technology would help lessen the complexity and cost required to develop Replicator and related drone systems to counter China.
“Conversely, the Navy could reduce the time its LUSV [Large Unmanned Surface Vessel] needs to operate autonomously as a missile magazine by making it an optionally-uncrewed vessel that is only automated for short periods,” Clark testified.
Much of Replicator’s system fielding acceleration will depend on software, which has a much more rapid development cycle than military platforms. U.S. Naval Forces Central Command’s (CENTCOM) Task Force 59 is integrating and evaluating unmanned systems and artificial intelligence technologies for maritime operations. “What is happening now in CENTCOM in Task Force 59 is probably the best exemplar of how we can try to try to get through a DevSecOps–rapid, iterative, putting together the technologists, users, the intel community,” Hicks said on Nov. 21.
In late August, Hicks announced the Replicator initiative to field thousands of “all-domain attritable autonomous systems in the next 18 to 24 months to help us overcome [China’s] biggest advantage, which is mass” (Defense Daily, Aug. 28).