A Sea Guardian drone flies over the USS Coronado during a 2021 drill in the Pacific Ocean. For several decades, military reformers such as retired Navy Capt. Jerry Hendrix have pleaded with the Pentagon to stop buying wildly expensive but vulnerable aircraft carriers and fighter jets and instead focus on getting vast numbers of cheap drones. But nobody seemed to listen.” was the title of Hendrix’s iconoclastic 2009 polemic for inexpensive survivable systems.
Hendrix became so eager for change that he argued the Navy needed a skunk works to reinvent itself for the 21st century. He proposed using Lake Michigan, away from prying Chinese eyes, to create an “” experimentation site for autonomous naval systems. He imagined it as a Navy version of the Air Force and CIA’s famous Area 51 test site in Nevada.But an addiction is hard to quit — especially one that benefits so many congressional districts around the country.
But there’s a catch: The Ukraine battlefield is a blizzard of electronic warfare. So systems must be truly autonomous, able to operate without GPS or other external guidance, as I describedfrom Kyiv of technology developed by the software company Palantir.
Hicks told me last week that the key to Replicator was “transforming internal processes.” One big goal was to leap over what a generation of reformers have called the “valley of death” — the long gap between development of prototype weapons and procurement and deployment at scale. “Bureaucracies need to be shown that new ways of doing things are possible. That’s what we’re doing,” she messaged me.
The Pentagon has managed for half a century to keep radical change from breaching its five walls. Carriers, bombers, tanks and fighter jets were built to last forever, and in a cozy world without peer competitors, it seemed that they could. But now, Hicks said, we’re in an era in which the Pentagon needs “deliberate discomfort” and “collaborative disruption.” It’s a revolution that’s long overdue.