The United States Department of Defense’s (DOD) effort to field and scale technology across the military at commercial speeds is on track to deliver its first integrated systems in 2025, according to defense leaders.
The first iteration of lethal unmanned systems developed under the Replicator initiative is slated for delivery by August. This first phase includes thousands of autonomous systems across multiple warfighting domains, creating what military leaders have called a “hellscape” to counter the Chinese Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army munitions buildup. The goal is to produce “attritable” capabilities — platforms that are unmanned and built affordably — allowing commanders to navigate a higher degree of risk in deploying them, according to the DOD.
The initiative, announced by defense officials in August 2023, is managed by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), working with U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, the military services, the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer and other components across the DOD. Officials set an initial delivery deadline of no more than 24 months, and the team will meet that deadline, Capt. Alex Campbell, DIU’s maritime portfolio director, said at the West 2025 conference hosted by the U.S. Naval Institute (USNI) and the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, according to USNI News.
Replicator’s second phase focuses on development of counter-drone systems, announced in September 2024 with a 24-month deadline for systems delivery.
“[Replicator] is not another [science and technology] project. It is meant to get to production, meant to field systems, in this case, in support of [U.S. Indo-Pacific Command],” Campbell said during a panel discussion at the January 2025 event. “It’s a lot of taking a pretty wide and diverse set of systems and a wide and diverse set of software and smashing them all together at a pace that is really more akin to commercial software tempos.”
Delivering integration quickly requires communication between operators and commercial providers, said Rear Adm. Seiko Okano, head of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command.
“It’s really about learning and then fixing and then delivering capability and speed. And I think it doesn’t end where we think it ends,” Okano said, according to Defense One. “I think this is a continual approach into operations, in my opinion, which is again something that is different than we’ve seen before.”
While Replicator’s initial focus has been rapidly scalable systems for air and sea, the ultimate goal remains to deliver unmanned capabilities focused on all domains.
“There’s a question around how this all gets integrated that I think government and industry are going to have to wrestle with together,” Chris Brose, chief strategy officer for Anduril Industries, said during the panel discussion. Anduril is one of several companies DIU chose in November 2024 to develop software solutions to automate coordination of swarms of hundreds or thousands of uncrewed assets across multiple domains to improve lethality and efficiency. Integrating that software will require greater coordination among services, panelists said.