The Pentagon is set to submit a spending plan and reprogramming requests to Congress in the “next several days” for its Replicator initiative to field thousands of attritable autonomous systems by August 2025, a senior defense official said Tuesday.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks provided the update during remarks at the American Dynamism Summit, which arrives as DoD has been briefing Congress on funding and acquisition strategies for the capabilities selected to be part of Replicator.
“We’ve put our heads down, worked with Congress, with the commercial sector and across DoD to deliver. And today, we are on-track to meet Replicator’s goals,” Hicks said, according to a transcript of her remarks at the event.
Hicks first announced the Replicator initiative last August, detailing the effort to produce and field thousands of “all-domain attritable autonomous systems, or ADA2 capabilities, over the next 18 to 24 months “to help us overcome [China’s] biggest advantage, which is mass” (Defense Daily, Aug. 28 2023).
Aditi Kumar, DIU’s deputy director for strategy, policy and national security partnerships, confirmed last week that DoD remains on track to meet its timeframe to field Replicator capabilities between February to August 2025 and has been briefing Congress on its plans (Defense Daily, Jan. 24).
Hicks on Tuesday provided a rundown of what DoD has accomplished with Replicator since the initial announcement, which has included identifying operational needs from the combatant commands, selecting the types of capabilities the department will pursue to meet those needs, developing acquisition strategies and analyzing the resources required to deliver those capabilities.
“What we did in five months normally takes DoD two-to-three years,” she said.
Hicks has previously said Replicator won’t require new funding and that the department was seeking out existing programs that could be scaled up for production (Defense Daily, Sept. 6).
The Pentagon has not yet announced specific systems selected for Replicator, with Kumar adding last week that the department may not publicly reveal all of the capabilities it’s including in the initiative.
“It is also part of this broader information strategy that I mentioned. We have to think through what parts of Replicator we want to speak about publicly and then what parts we want to reserve because that is what the operational needs mandate. And so, the department is working through those and we’ll share information at the appropriate time,” Kumar said during a Hudson Institute discussion.
Hicks on Tuesday also reiterated that going after attritable autonomous systems is only the first instantiation of the Replicator initiative with more efforts to follow in different technology areas.
“It’s about showing ourselves — and our adversaries — that DoD can move fast to shape the battlespace and equip our warfighters with what they need,” Hicks said.