Replicator passes a milestone as some troops complete training with cheap new drones

Some U.S. military units have completed training on cheap drones produced under the Replicator project, a milestone for the Pentagon's flagship innovation-at-scale effort, the deputy defense secretary said Wednesday.

The Pentagon has also begun experimenting with the drones in potential combat scenarios, such as fighting high-tech foes with advanced air defenses, Kathleen Hicks told a crowd at an NDIA event.

“We’ve been operating Replicator’s attritable autonomous systems in real time, in multiple regions around the world,” Hicks said. “We’re learning valuable lessons about ways to use ADA2 systems that we didn’t even consider at first.” 

Replicator was launched just less than a year ago to address the dawning realization that the U.S. military might swiftly run out of its expensive, hard-to-produce munitions in a conflict with Russia or China.

Now the program is on track to deliver “multiple thousands in multiple domains…by end of August 2025,” she said. 

Hicks added that Replicator systems would be formally included in the fiscal 2026 budget proposal now under construction. The Pentagon plans to spend a cobbled-together $500 million in each of fiscal years 2024 and 2025.

And she noted how various service branches are working to include the myriad new systems into their way of war.

“The Army has accelerated its move toward a formal program of record. The Navy is developing a standardized [commercial systems opening, or CSO] process for uncrewed systems that can do all sorts of missions. And the Air Force is building its own program of record out of a CSO collaboration it did” with the Defense Innovation Unit, she said.

Meanwhile, Hicks said, Replicator and other efforts are changing how the Defense Department procures things—for example, by pioneering greater use of Other Transaction Authorities and other ways to skip red tape. 

“Since January 2021, we’ve obligated $44 billion with OTAs, 61 percent more than at this point in the last administration. Production’s share of that total grew over 12-fold compared to four years ago,” she said.

The Pentagon could do even more with additional Congressional leeway—and by training its own acquisition staff to use the new tools, Govini CEO Tara Murphy Dougherty said Tuesday.

“The flexibility that Congress has given the department in terms of additional budgeting authority—they could go farther,” Murphy Dougherty said at the Defense One Cloud Summit in downtown Washington, D.C. “I'd love to see more flexibility in reprogramming and things like that, but there's a lot of authority to either leverage other transactions or non-[Federal Acquisition Regulation] arrangements that we simply have not taught the acquisition workforce. 

“What you have to do, as either a defense program officer, you know, a mission owner or a vendor who's trying to work with your DoD partner, you have to go find that one contracting officer who actually knows how to do that,” she said.