DepSecDef Hicks defends her Replicator drone initiative after Hill scrutiny

WASHINGTON — The Deputy Secretary of Defense took the stage to defend herself this morning here at the NDIA emerging technologies for defense conference. Kathleen Hicks devoted her opening speech to making the case for Replicator — her year-old signature initiative to buy thousands of affordable and “attritable” autonomous weapons — and added a none-too-subtle nudge to Congress to stop being so skeptical of the initiative and start actually helping.

“Now, we couldn’t do this without Congress,” Hicks acknowledged as she reached the end of her speech. We’re grateful for their bipartisan, bicameral support, across both authorizers and appropriators. … Do not take it for granted.”

“But,” she went on, her tone hardening, “if this country is going to transform its defense at the speed and scale we need, Congressional trust will need to substantially expand.”

On Replicator specifically, “we’ve done nearly 40 Hill briefings since last October, averaging about one a week,” she said. “That’s on an initiative that represents 0.059 percent of DoD’s budget. That depth of engagement isn’t scalable for Congress across the breadth of what we’re trying to accomplish.”

Congress also needs to back off of the related but distinct Rapid Defense Experimentation Reserve (RDER), Hicks said. This comes less than a week after Senate appropriators suggested RDER should be cut and funds moved to Replicator, which prompted a rare public rebuttal from Pentagon R&D chief Heidi Shyu, arguing that RDER played a vital role in vetting new tech that Replicator could then buy in bulk.

Hicks echoed that argument today. “We need efforts like RDER that bring rigor to our discernment of what is and isn’t ready to scale,” she said. “For instance, because of RDER’s successful transitions to programs of record, the Marine Corps’ Family of Integrated Targeting Cells for joint fires was accelerated by five years.”

RDER also helped lay the foundation for Replicator by blazing a trail for innovation initiatives in general, Hicks added in a one-on-one discussion with retired House Armed Services chairman Mac Thornbery. While Hicks announced her initiative just a year ago, “Replicator really builds on things we started early on. I mentioned RDER,” she told him, which is a big part of how “we blaze through experimentation to get systems validated and out the door.”

That nuanced distinction between RDER and Replicator is actual an important part of Hicks’ defense of her own initiative. Replicator is not about developing brand-new technology: It’s about taking cutting-edge but proven tech and rapidly ramping up production to militarily meaningful amounts.

Consider Replicator’s biggest announcement to date, the purchase (and probable fielding) of Switchblade 600 loitering munitions/kamikaze drones. Switchblade variants are hardly new — the company touts their battlefield successes in Ukraine — and the Army was already getting ready to buy them. Critics see those facts and argue Replicator is redundant, piggybacking on others’ successes. But in Hicks’ construct, adding oomph to good ideas already in progress is precisely the point.

“In the services, you will see ADA2 [all-domain, attritable and autonomous] systems embedded in regular order in the next budget,” she said. The Army and Air Force are creating relevant acquisition programs of record, while the Navy is streamlining Commercial Service Openings (CSOs).

Another criticism of Replicator is that it just hasn’t done that much yet. The Switchblade buy is the only purchase publicly announced to date, although several other technologies are reportedly at work in secrecy. Hicks spent much of her time today trying to counter that charge, listing accomplishments the initiative has made in the months since its official launch. While Replicator has not bought a lot of weapons yet, she argued it has created new processes, gotten industry to invest, done due diligence on cybersecurity and generally built the runway for procurement to now take off.

“We created a process to review and strengthen the cybersecurity of companies that support Replicator, before we publicize specific systems or vendor names,” Hicks said. “We’ve seen manufacturers planning to double or triple production capacity. Some already have, recognizing our demand signals. … Over 550 hardware and software companies have sent submissions to Replicator-related CSOs. Some don’t even know they’re about Replicator.”

“We’ve also obligated both R&D and procurement dollars, totaling in the nine-figures already, to a range of traditional defense industry and non-traditional companies,” she went on. (“Obligated” means contracts have been signed but the money has not yet been spent). “In some cases, we made competitive awards just three-to-four months after funds were appropriated — that’s about 66 percent shorter than the typical DoD contracting time.”

Overall, “we are on track to meet Replicator’s original goal of ‘multiple thousands in multiple domains in 18-24 months,’ that is, by end of August 2025,” Hicks said. “If we can move at this speed and scale now, do this much in under a year, imagine how much faster we could move next year, and the year after — let alone what our speed will be if we’re ever called to fight.”