WASHINGTON—Pentagon leadership is on track to field thousands of new uncrewed vehicles next year as part of a wider effort to develop a more resilient military.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks described the achievement as a key milestone in the Pentagon’s Replicator Initiative, which seeks to use non-traditional industry partners to scale the use of drones throughout the military in a diverse array of roles.
“We stand at the dawn of a new golden age of defense innovation and production, and we have only just begun,” Hicks said at an Aug. 7 exhibition hosted by the nation’s largest defense trade association.
“Although we have lots more work to do, we are on track to meet Replicator’s original goal of multiple thousands [of drones] in multiple domains, in 18 to 24 months,” she added.
The goal of the program is to allow commanders to accept higher degrees of risk without incurring large human or economic costs while fighting a numerically superior foe, such as communist China.
Hicks added that some military units had already completed new equipment training exercises with systems developed under the auspices of Replicator, and are now operating them “in real-time in multiple regions of the world.”
The military and its industry partners are “discovering new ways of warfare that extend America’s edge” as a result of these capabilities, she said.
The innovation stemming from the initiative is institutional in nature as well as technological.
To that end, Hicks said the Pentagon had drastically reduced the timeline for acquiring key systems by responding to the needs of the force “in parallel” rather than sequentially.
“Instead of waiting weeks, for instance, for combatant command, then the Joint Staff, then a military department to each verify that a capability meets a validated requirement, passing a coordination level from one office to the next, you get on a secure call together and confirm it in real-time at the highest level,” she said.
Among the technologies being deployed are ship-launched loitering drone munitions and several uncrewed vehicles that the Pentagon hopes can take over roles in logistics, sustainment, and even rescue efforts at sea.
Building out such capabilities would be critical to securing victory in a predominantly naval conflict, such as a war with China over the fate of Taiwan.
Hicks said that the Pentagon, Congress, and the private sector needed to “come together and work together” under the recognition that the United States is in a generational era of competition with communist China.
She added, however, that one of the largest barriers to victory the Pentagon faced was the continued waffling of a Congress that has failed to pass an annual defense budget on several occasions over the past 14 years.
On each of those occasions, the Pentagon was instead forced to rely on Continuing Resolutions (CRs), which allowed it to only spend a slightly augmented version of the previous year’s budget, essentially preventing the department from engaging in long-term investing.
“Since 2010 we’ve lost nearly five years in total to stop-gap funding measures: CRs, which are themselves half measures,” Hicks said. “Their usual restrictions rob us of a critical time to stay ahead in a rapidly changing world.”
Therefore there remained “major barriers” to successfully implementing other programs like Replicator, she said. Another was inflexible leadership in the Pentagon itself.
“I started working at DoD more than 30 years ago and I’ve heard plenty of salty language, but to this day, the most profane and damaging seven words I hear in the Pentagon are ‘this is how we’ve always done it’,” she said.
“That is simply unacceptable today.”
