The Pentagon wants to build a disposable drone army

The robots are coming

Fielding fleets of drones at this scale is also likely to speed up the military’s adoption of artificial intelligence. “The only way that thousands of drones work is if you have some measure of autonomy in the drones,” said Paul Scharre, a former Defense Department official now with the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). “Because they have thousands of systems of control, then you would need thousands of people operating them, and that’s a big personnel cost for the military.”

Both sides in the Ukraine war claim to be using artificial intelligence to improve their drones’ performance. So far, any use has probably been limited, but the war has also accelerated development of these capabilities. Ukraine’s influential digital transformation minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, has described fully autonomous killer drones as a “logical and inevitable next step” in military innovation.

Scharre is among the scholars raising concerns about the risks that an autonomous weapon could inadvertently trigger an international crisis by taking some risky action that a human in the loop might have decided against. (Another worry is that the speed of future conflicts and the pace of AI innovation may create pressure to take humans out of the loop.) He told Vox that autonomous weapons systems are more difficult to test than other applications of AI, such as self-driving cars, because of the difficulty of simulating the conditions under which they will be used. “You won’t get feedback on how something works until the war happened,” he said.

The issue is on policymakers’ agenda. Just this past week, the US hosted an inaugural meeting of a working group of governments focused on the responsible use of military AI.

Regardless, the age of AI aircraft is likely coming fast. The Air Force is also pursuing a separate program to develop so-called collaborative combat aircraft, or “robot wingman” drones: highly autonomous drones that will fly alongside crewed aircraft. Pentagon officials have described that program as “complementary” to Replicator.

Made in America

Building these drones on Hicks’s timeline sounds ambitious enough, but that’s just the beginning.

“Replicator is about fielding multiple thousands of autonomous systems by 2025, and that’s the metric we will be measured by in terms of success or failure,” said a senior Pentagon official authorized to speak with Vox on condition of anonymity. “But more important is the department’s culture change, in getting us to use our authority in a more creative way to accelerate delivery to the warfighter.”

Replicator takes aim at an outmoded Pentagon acquisitions and development process that has caused the average time for the development of US weapons systems, from research and development to deployment, to roughly quadruple since the 1970s.

And while the US has slowed down, potential adversaries have sped up. In 2018, Michael Griffin, then undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, estimated that it takes the US roughly 16 years to deliver a new idea to operational capacity, versus fewer than seven for China.

William Greenwalt, a former deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy now at the American Enterprise Institute, blames these delays on a culture of “systems analysis run amok” — the insistence on exhaustive testing and analysis for new systems. It’s “the greatest jobs program the Pentagon has ever developed,” he told Vox. “And as long as you don’t have a near peer competitor, you can have a jobs program.”

That’s no longer the case, given China’s rapidly rising capabilities and the country’s own investments in drones and autonomous systems. The senior Pentagon official acknowledged that the department had to find ways to get new systems from idea to operation, and that this would mean building “a culture where it’s okay to take acceptable risks, not irresponsible risks, but acceptable risks.”

Greenwalt predicted that the biggest technical challenge to Replicator will not be aerodynamics, range, or software, but manufacturing. Consider that it’s projected to take until 2025 for the US to ramp up production of 155-millimeter artillery ammunition — a system that hasn’t been altered that much since the early 20th century — to meet Ukraine’s battlefield needs. Replicator, a far more complex and completely new system, one that hasn’t even gone into production yet, is supposedly going to be built on a much faster timeline.

Adding to the headaches is the fact that the US commercial drone sector lags behind China’s, where Chinese companies like DJI dominate the market for the types of technologies that could be adapted for dual use. Ukraine’s forces have been celebrated for adapting these off-the-shelf systems for military purposes, and Kyiv now buys about 60 percent of the world’s supply of DJI’s popular Mavic quadcopter. But that’s obviously not an option for the US when China itself is the anticipated adversary.

Still, Greenwalt is cautiously excited about the level of ambition involved. “Can we basically adopt a manufacturing capability from scratch with new technology? That, I think, is the real revolutionary potential of Replicator.”

What Ukraine can’t teach us

As futuristic as Replicator may sound, there’s still a risk that the US is simply fighting the last war. Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defense program at CNAS and author of a recent study of drone innovation in the war in Ukraine, questions the degree to which the lessons of that war — one where small, less capable, but easily replaceable drones have played a major role — would be applicable to combat in the Pacific with China.

“The geography and the distances involved in the Pacific theatre are so much greater than in Ukraine, and the type of drones that the United States would employ need to have more range and endurance because they’re likely to be based at least several hundred miles away at the closest and probably much farther than that,” Pettyjohn told Vox. “So unless the United States is going to be pre-positioning drones on Taiwan, it’s going to need a different class of system.”

Pettyjohn worries that given the strict timelines established for Replicator, “the type of drones that it is going to end up producing are not going to be a lot of the ones that would be helpful.”

Pentagon officials declined to comment on the specific operational needs for Replicator but Kumar acknowledged that, “We are dealing with a very different environment, an amphibious environment. And that presents a different set of concepts of operations and targets [than Ukraine].”

Automatic weapons

The main advantage of drones, of course, is that they decrease the risks to human troops. “It does allow us to have fewer people in the line of fire by replicating what our soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines, and guardians do very well,” the Pentagon senior official said.

The shift to a great emphasis on autonomous systems comes at a time when the military is scaling back on its human manpower. In February, the Army announced it was cutting the size of its force by 24,000 — around 5 percent — mainly by not filling already empty posts. The move is part of a deliberate restructuring as the Army shifts away from its post-9/11 focus on counterterrorism, with deep cuts to special operations forces and more staff for drones, air defense, and cyber capabilities. It also comes as the Army has been consistently missing its recruiting goals.

A potential war with China is likely to involve greater numbers of troops in combat, and greater casualties, than the US has seen in decades. It’s possible that in the future, robots may be able to make up, to some extent, for human manpower in wars like these. We can only hope we won’t have to find out.

Joshua Keating is a senior correspondent at Vox covering foreign policy and world news with a focus on the future of international conflict. He is the author of the 2018 book, Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood, an exploration of border conflicts, unrecognized countries, and changes to the world map.