Pentagon’s small, disposable ‘Replicator’ smart drones aim to overwhelm China
Jamie McIntyre
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On one level, the war in Ukraine is eerily reminiscent of World War I trench warfare, a grinding artillery war of attrition with heavy casualties on both sides and weeks and months where little territory changes hands.
But upon closer inspection, Ukraine’s innovative use of drones provides a glimpse of how the Pentagon believes wars of the future will be fought, and it’s in a race to “out drone” its potential adversaries, especially China.
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“Our main strategic competitor today, 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 enjoyed for decades,” Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks said in a series of speeches this summer. “But the one advantage that they can never blunt, steal, or copy — because it’s embedded in our people — is American ingenuity: our ability to innovate, change the game, and in the military sphere, to imagine, create, and master the future character of warfare.”
Hicks is heading up something called the “Replicator initiative,” an audacious Manhattan Project-style undertaking to develop and field an army, navy, air force, and space force of thousands upon thousands of small, disposable drones by the summer of 2025.
In Pentagon parlance, the technology has been dubbed “ADA2” — AD for “all-domain” and A2 for “attritable autonomy,” with “attritable” meaning disposable, as in some cases single-use systems that would be inexpensive and easily replaced.
The idea is to augment America’s arsenal of traditional, big-ticket weapons systems such as aircraft carriers and stealth bombers, which Hicks says are “large, exquisite, expensive, and few,” with new high-tech, AI-assisted, robotic platforms that are “small, smart, cheap, and many.”
“Imagine flocks of ADA2 systems, flying at all sorts of altitudes, doing a range of missions, building on what we’ve seen in Ukraine. They could be deployed by larger aircraft, launched by troops on land or sea, or take off themselves,” Hicks said.
“Imagine distributed pods of self-propelled ADA2 systems afloat, powered by the sun and other virtually limitless resources. … Imagine constellations of ADA2 systems on orbit, flung into space scores at a time, numbering so many that it becomes impossible to eliminate or degrade them all.”
And imagine all these systems costing far less than a single Ford-class aircraft carrier, with its $13 billion price tag.
“Replicator is not a new program,” Hicks insists. “We’re not creating a new bureaucracy, and we will not be asking for new money in FY24. Not all problems need new money. … Replicator will use existing funding, existing programming lines.”
Taking another page from the Ukraine playbook, the Pentagon plans to draw heavily on private sector innovation, including commercial, nontraditional, and traditional defense companies.
In Ukraine, “there are about 60 companies that are building these types of drones. What’s interesting is it’s just like startups in the sense that they’re … moving so quickly,” said former Google CEO Eric Schmidt after a visit to Kyiv earlier this year.
“This is both a broadband war but it’s also a technology war in the sense that it’s innovative. And innovation occurs in small companies not in the [Ministry of Defense],” he told CNN in July.
“I don’t think the Ukrainian drone strategy is completely formed,” said Schmidt, who is also a former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. “But they’re building a completely new theory of war.”
It’s a theory the Pentagon’s been trying to get its arms around for a few years now.
“The battlefield of the future will require rapid and constant movement and the ability to remain small and relatively invisible just to survive. And perhaps the biggest change is the rapid onset of artificial intelligence and quantum computing,” Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley said in a June speech at the National Press Club.
“Artificial intelligence will be able to process complex information at speeds that no human mind can match. So our task, the United States’s task, is for our military, the United States military, to maintain our current decisive advantage, our lethality, our readiness, our competence, by optimizing these technologies for the conduct of war.”
There has been much handwringing on Capitol Hill over China’s growing numerical naval superiority, with the Chinese navy on track to have a fleet of 440 warships by the end of the decade, compared to as few as 290 for the United States.
But another lesson from the Ukraine experience is that the decisive factor in a future war may not be how many ships are at sea, but instead how many satellites are in space.
“We’ve all seen in Ukraine how emerging tech developed by commercial and nontraditional companies — from Starlink to Switchblades to commercial imagery — can be decisive in defending against modern military aggression,” says Hicks.
“Since 2018, the United States has outpaced the PRC’s growth in space launches and satellites by 2-to-12 times. So, the space race is now a space chase,” thanks, she says, to America’s innovative commercial space companies.
How would Replicator work on the battlefield?
“The initial step might be mobilizing two separate swarms of small, unmanned vehicles,” writes former NATO Commander retired Adm. James Stavridis, whose novel 2034 imagines a future war with China. “The first group, numbering in the tens of thousands, would be focused on surveillance and reconnaissance, sending back uncountable millions of data bits to form a precise targeting picture.”
Then, he posits, “The battlespace would be turned over to hundreds or thousands of vehicles large enough to accommodate payloads of explosives. Working alongside them would be drones carrying out cyberattacks to blind the enemy, effectively ‘cloaking’ our own forces while destroying an enemy’s fighting ability.”
“Replicator is meant to help us overcome the PRC’s biggest advantage, which is mass. More ships. More missiles. More people,” Hicks said. “Before Russia invaded Ukraine again last February, they had that advantage too. Yet we’ve seen in Ukraine what low-cost, attritable systems can do.”
“Rarely have America’s war-winning strategies relied solely on matching an adversary ship-for-ship and shot-for-shot. After all, we don’t use our people as cannon fodder,” Hicks argues. “We’ll counter the PLA’s mass with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, harder to beat.”
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To cynics or realists who think this is a lot of pie in the sky and that the Pentagon bureaucracy can’t move fast enough to get it all done in just two years, Hicks says she gets that.
“I’m deeply, personally familiar with almost every maddening flaw in our system,” she said. “But I also know that when the time is right, and when we apply enough leadership, energy, urgency, and depth of focus, we can get it done. That’s what America does.”