Is ‘Replicator’ the future of combat, or just a future boondoggle?

The Department of Defense’s Replicator program is meant to be the Pentagon’s moonshot to equalize the balance with the Chinese army in the Indo-Pacific. 

The general concept — that unmanned systems will dominate — is a sound one. Yet Replicator stems from a reading of the Ukraine War and the Indo-Pacific balance that is unmoored from reality. The risk is that Replicator becomes not a strategic offset, but a boondoggle that stalls U.S. force development and gives the PLA the decisive edge it is seeking.

The Replicator program, according to Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, will generate “All-Domain Attributable Autonomy,” or “ADA2” in Pentagonese. The language provides an obvious inversion of what was once termed China’s anti-access area denial, or “A2AD,” Indo-Pacific network. 

According to Hicks, Replicator arises out of two trends: the theater-strategic balance in the Indo-Pacific and operational developments in Ukraine. 

China has, to put it bluntly, out-built the U.S. in the Indo-Pacific. U.S. shipyards take around four years to build and launch a major surface combatant. Chinese yards do the same in one to three years.

The same is true in a variety of surface ships and combat aircraft. Chinese ship-handling and operational skill are obviously unclear — a natural result of the PLA’s lack of combat experience and the opacity of an increasingly personalized dictatorship under Xi Jinping. But from the view of pure attrition, China can absorb more punishment than the U.S.

The solution, through Replicator, is ADA2, an offset in all but name. ADA2’s goal is to overhaul U.S. force structure, procuring large quantities of low-cost, high-volume systems to overcome China’s multiplying industrial advantages. The Pentagon turns to Ukraine to justify this strategy. The Ukrainians have used unmanned aerial systems to compete with a quantitatively superior Russian military and largely held their own, particularly by optimizing artillery usage.

Moreover, Ukraine has increasingly turned to drones for long-range strikes, executing attacks well within Russian territory against high-value, low-density assets such as the strategic bombers that Russia has used to prosecute its strategic bombardment campaign. By flooding the battlespace with similar systems, the Pentagon hopes to obviate China’s investment in the high-end platforms that characterize modern combat.

The general precepts behind Replicator are reasonable.  China is, again, grossly outbuilding the U.S. militarily. Drones have fundamentally modified the character of modern combat. Yet the issue is in the details, which will undoubtedly hamper execution.

The underlying data in Ukraine, for one, do not imply that unmanned aerial systems simply transform warfare. Rather, in ground combat, combined with loitering munitions and integrated air defenses, they modify the character of combat largely by improving the precision of the high-cost traditional weapons that Replicator incorrectly seeks to replace. 

In other words, the point of Ukraine’s drone reconnaissance system is to enable rapid, responsive, accurate artillery fire that can ultimately build a strike corridor into the Russian rear for a high-value munition — a HIMARS or a Storm Shadow missile for example — to exploit. This process takes careful planning and execution, as Ukraine’s recent strike on Sevastopol demonstrates: Ukraine had to disable Russian air defenses and then secure a flight corridor for air-launched cruise missiles before execution. Undoubtedly, this system requires an enormous number of drones and loitering munitions.

Yet not even the Russian Lancet, an effective loitering drone in counterbattery operations, can displace artillery, for there is no substitute for the explosive power delivered by an artillery shell, long-range rocket, or ground-attack missile.

In the Indo-Pacific, this would imply a revitalized sensor network comprised of lower-cost unmanned, along with perhaps loitering munitions, and a low earth orbit satellite array resilient against kinetic, cyber, and electronic anti-satellite attacks.  But rather than becoming the backbone of a new force structure, per ADA2, these new items should enable traditional air-naval fires, namely carrier air wing delivered missiles and long-range weapons mounted on US strategic bombers. 

Surface combatants may well need to be redesigned over time, considering the immense destructive power of modern missile warheads compared to the relatively limited damage control facilities on these warships, but the goal is nevertheless enabling the force that exists, rather than attempting to completely overhaul it.

Replicator also runs up against an obvious and immediate problem in the Indo-Pacific: the basic requirements of Indo-Pacific air-naval operations demand a more sophisticated platform than those of a ground war.  Simply removing a pilot from an aircraft does not inevitably make it cheaper: the Predator and Reaper are significantly cheaper than the F-15 because they are far less sophisticated. The equipment the U.S. needs in the Indo-Pacific — primarily a host of unmanned long-range sensors that can feed information back to fires units — is not cheap by design. It is, in fact, remarkably expensive. Hence the route to ADA2 requires a very large investment. The Replicator effort will rapidly spawn all manner of programs of record that are not cheap at all.

Additionally, and most critically, Replicator does not impose on China an insoluble cost dilemma sinceChina is already a world-leader in low-cost drones.  The vast majority of UAS deployed in Ukraine are Chinese-produced, while China’s DJI and Autel companies corner the global consumer drones market. 

The PLA will be able to leverage these capabilities to create an ADA2 apparatus of its own, albeit one backed up by the supposedly outdated warships and aircraft currently under production. As a matter of cost-imposition, developing Replicator may be reasonable if its products fit into a coherent operational concept.  But absent an operational concept, Replicator is a bad bet.

Replicator may mark a start toward a more coherent force structure and procurement logic, particularly if it can encourage contractors to offer equipment at a lower price point, thereby breaking the one-size-fits-all trend in U.S. defense development and procurement. 

But an underlying strategy must shape U.S. force structure, and this is what we lack. Absent a strategy, Replicator will simply throw good money after bad in a misguided attempt to achieve strategic advantage without strategy. 

The U.S. cannot afford a five-year, or even a two-year procurement disaster, given the pace of Chinese military development. A Replicator program that envisions technology as an end in itself rather than a means to achieve a thus-far inchoate strategy will undermine deterrence.

Seth Cropsey is founder and president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of “Mayday” and “Seablindness.”