The United States Department of Defense (DOD) has delivered the first system produced under the department’s Replicator, an initiative to field thousands of attritive autonomous systems by 2025 aimed at countering the People’s Liberation Army’s munitions buildup.
The first tranche of drones produced under the initiative, announced by Deputy U.S. Defense Secretary Kathleen Hick in August 2023, reached warfighters in the Indo-Pacific in early May 2024, Hicks said in a news release. The delivery “shows that warfighter-centric innovation is not only possible, it’s producing real results,” she said. “Even as we deliver systems, our end-to-end capability development process continues. Together with the private sector and with support from Congress, the Replicator initiative is delivering capabilities at greater speed and scale while simultaneously burning down risk and alleviating systemic barriers across the department.”
Hicks announced Replicator in 2023 as part of an effort to speed the deployment of new weapons technologies from research lab to warfighter, leveraging traditional and nontraditional vendors.
The DOD has not discussed specific details of the systems to be deployed but confirmed in May 2024 that the department would accelerate delivery of the Switchblade-600 loitering munition, which has demonstrated utility in Ukraine and will provide additional capability to U.S. forces.
“This is a critical step in delivering the capabilities we need at the scale and speed we need, to continue securing a free and open Indo-Pacific,” said Adm. Samuel Paparo, Commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. The entire department has come together to help make this a reality.”
General capabilities delivered include uncrewed surface vehicles and aerial systems and counter-uncrewed aerial systems of various sizes and payloads, according to the news release.
The DOD said its next Replicator effort is to diversify the vendor base for uncrewed surface vehicles through the recently announced Production-Ready, Inexpensive, Maritime Expeditionary (PRIME) Commercial Solutions Opening (CSO). The CSO process allows U.S. and international companies to pitch technologies to the U.S. Defense Department in a fast-track process for a prototype contract. The DOD expects to award several contracts this year.
While Replicator’s initial focus has been rapidly scalable systems for air and sea, the ultimate goal remains to deliver capabilities focused on all domains. The DOD is prototyping autonomous land systems, but there are unique challenges, said Gen. James Rainey, commander of the U.S. Army Futures Command, which is charged with preparing the Army for future battlefields. Autonomous systems are changing the way conflicts are fought, Rainey said in a discussion on strategic land power at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in June 2024. Because land presents more navigation challenges, such as terrain variations and obstacles, uncrewed ground systems have not progressed as much, with current systems focused on support functions. Nonetheless, Rainey said, the capabilities are in the pipeline.
“I think what we are witnessing is the very leading edge of the major disruption of the land domain that’s going to be caused by machines,” Rainey said. “Technology is now getting to the point where it can actually have meaningful, significant disruption in the land domain, and we’d better be ahead of that.”