The Pentagon is to pick the Replicator contenders in the next three weeks, and DoD estimates a unit cost in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, as the U.S. seeks to field several thousand autonomous, attritable assets in the next two years to counter China, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said on Nov. 21.
Replicator is not a program of record, but an initiative to make it easier for systems to cross the modernization “valley of death” and field more quickly in significant numbers.
“We will select the [Replicator] candidates within the next about three weeks,” Hicks told a Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington, D.C. “I would not say the candidates will be announced…Our goal is an operational goal, which is, in addition to [shortening] the acquisition cycle, 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 will be accelerated through Replicator is to be determined.”
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).
The unit cost of Replicator “depends on the program or project/the application, and that’s usually a range/payload combination, and payload can be things like cameras, to be clear,” Hicks said on Nov. 21. “But what we are thinking of is in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars per unit [rather] than in the millions of dollars per unit. That’s the attritable piece.”
The U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) are “not meant to be attritable,” she said. “We’re really focused [for Replicator] on these generally much smaller and certainly less expensive systems. We would expect that we’re talking about something like less than .5 percent of the defense budget [for programs under Replicator].”
Last month, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), the chair of the House Armed Services Committee’s cyber, information technologies, and innovation panel, said that his biggest concern with Replicator is DoD’s possible diversion of funds for munitions’ replenishment/advancement and other needs to Replicator, which is to rely initially on existing Pentagon funds (Defense Daily, Oct. 19).
Gallagher also chairs the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party.
“The [Replicator] money is in the programs,” Hicks said on Nov. 21. “I really feel like I’m about to quote It’s A Wonderful Life here. There are attritable, autonomy programs in the [military] services or the COCOMs [combatant commands] now–SOCOM [U.S. Special Operations Command], for example. We are already on that path. This is not a new chunk of money. The question in [FY] 24 is, ‘How could we speed up the delivery of those systems that are already in there?’ ‘How do we pick the ones that are most relevant for INDOPACOM that can deliver quickly and in quantity?’ That’s what we’re looking at right now. The money is in the systems for [FY] 24.'”
“For [FY] 25, we’ll be looking at those systems and maybe an additional tranche of systems that aren’t quite that mature today but we think can still deliver within the 18 to 24 months from last August,” she said. “We’ll add funds as needed in there, or maybe the services have already put the funds there. We’ll be able to tell the Hill what that looks like. I have spoken with Rep. Gallagher. I have been very clear with him, and I will say very clearly here. We are all about the strategy winning. We are not gonna go after long-range strike platforms or systems or munitions that are critical to the fight in order to look at another approach [Replicator] here, which is complementary…All of that is needed. It’s a ‘Yes, And’ answer, and it is not a lot of money.”
In the classic 1946 Christmas season movie, It’s A Wonderful Life, actor Jimmy Stewart, playing George Bailey, tells the townspeople of Bedford Falls, Mass., who are panicking and thinking of withdrawing their funds from Bailey and Brothers Building and Loan, “You’re thinking of this place all wrong, as if I had the money back in a safe. The money’s not here. Well, your money’s in Joe’s house. That’s right next to yours. And in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Macklin’s house, and a hundred others. Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then, they’re going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?”