Pentagon Accelerates, Builds Its “Replicator” Drone Swarm System

By Kris Osborn, President, Warrior

Blanketing enemy areas with surveillance, testing or “jamming” enemy air defenses, patrolling coastal areas from the surface along the perimeter of enemy territory, launching drone swarm attacks to overwhelm enemy defenses and even destroying enemy drones … are merely a few of the possible missions expected from the Pentagon’s evolving “Replicator” unmanned systems effort.

In development for several years, the “Replicator” effort involves groups of drones, operating in coordination with varying levels of autonomy and AI-enabled computing across multiple domains; is now advancing to a new accelerated phase in its development, according to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks.

“I am pleased to announce that the Department will begin investing in scalable production for these critical capabilities,” Hicks said, according to a Pentagon transcript of her remarks.

The initial manufacturing, Hicks explained, is designed to expedite several key needed concepts of operation to include destroying enemy drones, operating on the surface of the ocean and simply flying in the air from various host platforms.

“The first tranche of Replicator capabilities include uncrewed surface vehicles (USV), uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) and counter-uncrewed aerial systems (c-UAS) of various sizes and payloads from several traditional and non-traditional vendors,” the Pentagon statement said.

Overall, the tactical elements of Replicator are described by Pentagon weapons developers in terms of “All-Domain-Attributeable-Autonomy,” (ADA2), a concept advancing the operational use of low-cost, yet networked and coordinated groups of unmanned systems conducting missions across multiple domains in a seamless, high-speed fashion. One of the key elements of an “attritable” drone force likely involve efforts to build in operational resilience by engineering small, lower-cost drones which can be lost with little negative impact. Simple redundancy is part of this equation as well, given that a large number of drones or ISR “nodes” or weapons can simultaneously provide multiple sources of data and ensure continued mission functionality in the event some drones are destroyed or disabled. A given enemy area, for example, can be blanketed at one time with multiple nodes using different surveillance vectors, and enemy targets can be tracked, descended upon and destroyed with multiple strikes from different angles. Yet another beneficial element of a redundancy strategy can simply be described in terms of the Pentagon’s use of the word “attributable.” This means that a mission can continue effectively in the event that some nodes within a group or swarm are destroyed or disabled by enemy attacks.