In a world where technology rapidly evolves, ensuring service members have the tools they need to maintain security remains a growing challenge for the United States and its Allies and Partners. Militaries must constantly adapt and upgrade systems to stay ahead of emerging threats while working within budget constraints and procurement processes that frequently prove sluggish compared to the commercial market. A U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) effort aims to change that.
In August 2023, then-U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced the Replicator initiative, the department’s effort to streamline emerging technology development and delivery into the hands of Soldiers by leveraging the commercial sector. The DOD wants to increase the role of innovation as part of its integrated strategy.
Acquiring technology using such innovative tools as artificial intelligence (AI) and uncrewed systems — where the technology can change within a matter of weeks — requires a procurement process that is more agile than traditional, yearslong processes to buy battleships or large weapons systems. The DOD designed Replicator to expedite technology development and procurement. Not a standalone program, it leverages existing funding, programming and authority to accomplish its goals. To lead the initiative, Hicks established the Deputy’s Innovation Steering Group, which she co-chaired with the vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The steering group works with the DOD’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to meet the initiative’s goals, collaborating with industry and international Partners. The process is meant to parallel DOD procurement but faster, with an initial price tag of $1 billion in fiscal years 2024 and 2025. “Together, these efforts are shaving three to six years off transition and delivery timelines for warfighter priorities,” including satellite communications and surveillance systems and antijamming radio links, Hicks said during Replicator’s announcement. “This is about systematically tackling the highest barriers to enabling and unleashing the potential of U.S. and partner innovations.”
The impetus for Replicator is the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) pace of weapons buildup. A 2023 DOD report estimated that the PLA is rapidly developing long-range precision strike weapons, integrated air defense systems, hypersonic weapons and chemical and biological weapons, as well as nuclear capabilities, with a goal for complete military modernization and a “world class military” by 2027.
“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has spent the last 20 years building a modern military carefully crafted to blunt the operational advantages we’ve had for decades,” Hicks said during a September 2023 news conference in Arlington, Virginia. Replicator 1, the effort’s initial phase, was to deliver its first integrated systems by August 2025, according to the DOD. This first tranche will help overcome the PLA’s attempts at advantage in mass: more ships, more missiles, more forces, and “can help a determined defender stop a large aggressor from achieving its objectives, put fewer people in the line of fire, and be made, fielded and upgraded at the speed warfighters need without long maintenance tails,” Hicks said. Examples of these capabilities are self-piloting ships and uncrewed aircraft. “Now is the time to scale with systems that are harder to plan for, harder to hit and harder to beat than those of potential competitors,” she said.
The world has changed from the department developing its own technology to the department needing to buy what the commercial world has developed because now, some of the leading technologies the department needs, if you think about AI, cyber tools, drones — that’s being developed in the commercial world and often the consumer world.” ~ Mike Brown, former Defense Innovation Unit director, U.S. Department of Defense
During the 1950s, the DOD developed most of the technology it needed without having to buy from the commercial sector, said Mike Brown, former director of the DIU, in a November 2023 Hot Wash podcast, which covers Defense Department news. “The world has changed from the department developing its own technology to the department needing to buy what the commercial world has developed because now, some of the leading technologies the department needs, if you think about AI, cyber tools, drones — that’s being developed in the commercial world and often the consumer world,” and these changes demand new procurement with a focus on capabilities instead of programs, he said.
Hicks expects Replicator to drive culture change just as much as technology change. “The ‘replication’ isn’t just about production,” she said at the September 2023 Defense News Conference in Arlington, Virginia. “We also aim to replicate and inculcate how we will achieve that goal, so we can scale whatever is most efficient, effective and relevant in the future, again and again.”
Keeping pace with technology
Militaries have used uncrewed systems in the battlefield for more than a century. In 1849, Austria used hundreds of “balloon bombs” to attack Venice during the First Italian War of Independence. Imperial Japan also used the technology against the U.S. during World War II. Both efforts proved largely unsuccessful.
In 1915, British forces mounted a camera on a single-engine biplane to capture images for a map of the German front. Two years later, inventors developed an uncrewed aerial torpedo in the U.S., but it never saw combat. During the 1930s, the United Kingdom and the U.S. produced small, radio-controlled aircraft for target training. The U.S. officially began its drone program in 1936.
Reconnaissance uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) were deployed on a large scale during the Vietnam War, and began to be used as decoys, launching missiles and dropping leaflets for psychological operations. The systems’ use has grown globally in the decades since as technology enables drones to fly higher and for greater distances.
Traditional government procurement processes can be difficult to navigate for small, agile companies developing technology and can take years to execute. Some ideas fall into the “valley of death” between a concept or prototype and a DOD contract. Other products become obsolete before they make it to the field.
“Software has about a two-week lifespan on the battlefield today,” Trent Emeneker, a Marine Corps aviator serving as DIU’s Blue UAS program manager, told National Defense magazine. DIU can get a software update approved in about 90 days while DOD approval can take more than a year, he said. His team is working to establish a pace that more closely follows the commercial sector, getting software releases vetted and approved within 96 hours. “That’s still longer than we want.” DIU aims to field systems that reduce approval time for software updates to 30 seconds, Emeneker said. “That’s where we are going to go, because that’s where we have to go.”
The U.S. and its Allies and Partners are using lessons learned in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, where Ukraine has fielded uncrewed systems at an unprecedented scale to change the balance of power against Russia’s 2022 invasion. Ukraine’s armed forces have integrated UAVs into their structure. Ukraine has acquired thousands of drones from the country’s own companies and, in some cases, private citizens modifying commercial drones in their homes for reconnaissance and attack. Strategically deployed, a drone can destroy assets and cause millions of dollars in damage. Nearly every fighting brigade has an assault drone company, and most units have small reconnaissance drones, according to Reuters.
With virtually no Navy, Ukraine used relentless drone boat and missile attacks to push Russian warships from the Black Sea, damaging or destroying more than 30 Russian navy vessels and forcing the Russian navy to withdraw from occupied Crimea. In September 2024, Ukraine conducted one of the largest and most effective drone attacks of the entire war, using domestically produced long-range UAVs. The assault caused a blast large enough at a weapons depot deep inside Russia that earthquake monitoring stations picked it up. Ukraine claimed the strike destroyed buildings housing Iskander and Tochka missiles and North Korean KN-23 short-range ballistic missiles, The Associated Press reported.
Ukraine has used drones to track enemy forces, guide artillery and bomb targets. In addition to long-range drones, the country’s use of remotely controlled first-person-view (FPV) UAVs allow the pilot to see what the vehicle sees through a headset or goggles and can be armed with explosives to crash into targets. FPVs can cost as low as $500, with a range of up to 20 kilometers, depending on size, battery and payload.
The speed and agility with which Ukraine has built its UAV force has impressed military leaders throughout NATO. “We used to think about either you have precision or you have mass. That’s no longer the case,” Michael C. Horowitz, then-U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development and emerging capabilities, said during a January 2024 virtual talk hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “What we need in many instances is going to be precise mass.”
In October 2023, DIU and NATO partners met with Brave1, the Ukraine government’s defense technology cluster, in Warsaw, Poland, to discuss how to deliver emerging technology more efficiently to the front lines via partnerships between the public and private sectors. More than 200 European, Ukrainian and U.S. officials representing industry, investors, governments and nonprofits attended the forum.
“In order to address our operational demands and stay at the forefront of innovation, it’s essential for us to adopt a flexible approach in communication and ensure alignment among our multiple stakeholders and partners,” Sergiy Koshman, then head of international partnerships and cooperation for Brave1, said at the Warsaw forum. “This gathering has successfully demonstrated our ability to establish swift, adaptable and efficient communication channels to deal with the critical aspects of UAS requirements. I’m thankful to our partners at DIU for their constructive and agile approach. As Brave1, we are eager to further strengthen and expand our cooperation.”
In May 2024 — less than a year after Hicks’ initial announcement — Replicator had delivered autonomous systems to the Indo-Pacific, according to a DOD statement. The first tranche of the program included more than 1,000 Switchblade drones, an unspecified number of maritime drones and uncrewed surface vehicles. In September 2024, the DOD announced Replicator 2, which focuses on developing counterdrone technology, particularly systems that will protect “critical installations and force concentration,” then-U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a memo. The U.S. military will include funding for Replicator 2 in its 2026 budget request, with systems delivery expected within 24 months of funding, Austin said in the memo.
Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, California.
Anna Higman/U.S. Marines
The department will work with military services to identify and scale technology that addresses gaps in counterdrone capabilities. The U.S. Army wants to explore counterdrone systems that not only detect objects but also use AI and machine learning to help decide how to engage them, Doug Bush, the Army’s former acquisition chief, told Defense News.
“It’s kind of a three-part problem set,” Bush said. “You have to detect it, figure out what to do, and then have an effector that can do something about it if you’re allowed. That middle part of figuring out what to do and bringing the data into that, I think, is where we can do better than we have.”