The United States is accelerating an effort to revolutionize modern warfare by fielding swarms of self-operating drones and weapons systems. The push will shape the next generation of war and, military leaders hope, give America a leg up on China in the new global arms race.
With the Pentagon’s new Replicator initiative, the U.S. is moving fast toward an ambitious goal: propping up a fleet of legacy ships, aircraft and vehicles with the support of weapons powered by artificial intelligence (AI), creating a first-of-its-kind class of war technology. It’s also spurring a huge boost across the defense industry, which is tasked with developing and manufacturing the systems.
For those watching the U.S. defense and security field closely, Replicator was greeted with a sigh of relief — though it’s also raising a host of concerns related to accountability and the human cost of autonomous warfare.
“This is the same as the transition from crossbows to guns, from cavalry to tanks,” said Steve Blank, co-founder of the Gordian Knot Center for National Security Innovation at Stanford University. “Thousands of these things that are semi-autonomous or autonomous is a major transformation in warfare. Period. All nations will eventually get here.”
The U.S. is hoping that Replicator, designed to field thousands of fully autonomous systems within two years, will get the military ahead of foreign adversaries who are also pursuing this technology, particularly China.
In the event of a clash over the self-governing island nation of Taiwan, AI-powered drones and aircraft will be vital to countering a larger Chinese military force, especially over contested waters and airspace where Beijing’s mass could overwhelm American forces.
Moreover, the war in Ukraine has shown just how important drones are. While those deployed in Ukraine and Russia are being guided remotely by human operators, AI-powered ones would significantly boost the capabilities of the forces deploying them by swarming targets.
Replicator also means faster and cheaper military technology. It’s spurring a huge boost across the defense industry, giving smaller defense tech companies a chance to compete for contracts against traditional defense giants.
If successful, the U.S. will be able to quickly produce these drones for a much cheaper cost than conventional systems, putting the military at a competitive advantage against other rivals.
The only question for defense contractors and war analysts is whether the U.S. can meet the program’s ambitious timeline.
Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced the new initiative in late August and said the goal was to develop these weapon systems in the next 18-24 months. She added this month that Replicator does not involve new funding or personnel, but rather a steering committee will guide its progress across the entire military.
Eric Pahon, a spokesperson for the Defense Department, said it was mostly a matter of scaling out technology. He admitted there were some challenges with bureaucracy, but said the U.S. has a history of being able to pivot.
“A lot of this is about cutting the red tape within the department,” Pahon said. “We have the ability to do these things, but it’s going to take a massive mindset change and somebody who’s able to help kind of cut through the biggest delays that we have in the department.”
Pahon said Replicator would put the U.S. ahead of China and allow for AI weapons systems to be mass-deployed in nearly every field of warfare.
“The great thing about these kinds of cheap systems is that we can really easily reprogram them and refit and be really creative,” he said. “I can send an [autonomous] drone to carry a bomb or it can do weather readings or it can do surveillance. I’ve got thousands of them, no big deal.”
One challenge might be getting all of the technology to talk to each other, Pahon said, but there are plans to invest more heavily in Joint All-Domain Command and Control, a computerized network in the early stages of development.
Over time, Congress will need to step in with more robust funding for the next-generation weaponry and support structure. It’s not clear if AI weapons will end up as an immediate priority in the defense spending bills currently caught up in budget negotiations on Capitol Hill.
Last year’s defense bill included a requirement to enhance warfighting capabilities with AI and report annually through 2025 on progress.
Replicator inherits the original goal of Assault Breaker, a U.S. military program in the 1970s that proposed methods of using swarms of weapons, like long-range smart weapons that divide into tracking submunitions, to counter a larger Soviet Union until reinforcements could arrive.
Assault Breaker 2, similar to its predecessor, appears to have been rolled out in the last decade. Testimony from Steven Walker, then a leader of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in 2019 said the Pentagon was focused on using “emerging technologies” in the strategic initiative.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.