Will Pentagon Hallucinations Save Tech?

The U.S. Navy is currently losing its war with the Yemeni Houthis for control of the Red Sea, despite having expended $1 billion on missiles and airstrikes. Traffic on the vital waterway is down 70% , while traffic at Israel’s Eilat port is at a complete standstill. But the Admirals would prefer we focus on their vision of vast armadas of artificially intelligent drones thronging the air and waters around Taiwan, all “networked” by the Defense Joint All-Domain Command and Control system. In the words of Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo, this will create an “unmanned hellscape,” for any Chinese invasion force, rendering their lives “utterly miserable.”

Central to this vision is the “Replicator Initiative,” the cherished hobby-horse of Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks. In an acronym-gorged address in August 2023, Hicks outlined how Chinese superiority in numbers would be countered, with “thousands” of “All-Domain, Attritable Autonomous (ADA2) systems” which would overcome “the challenge of anti-access, area-denial systems. Our ADA2 to thwart their A2AD,” all within two years.

To thwart unwelcome taxpayer enquiries regarding pertinent details of the program, such as cost and where the money will actually go, Replicator is entirely “black,” cloaked in classification. In March this year Hicks stated it would cost a total of $1 billion evenly split between 2024 and 2025, a tellingly vague figure. Veteran Pentagon analyst Chuck Spinney pithily summarized this news, “the vagueness speaks for itself,” he told me. “These figures are meaningless, other than they are too low.”

We are equally ill-informed as to what Hicks’ magic ADA2 drones will actually consist of, though there are suggestions the bulk of them might be the small Switchblade drones developed and marketed by the AeroVironment corporation. These have seen service in Ukraine, but have been largely discarded by the Ukrainians as essentially useless in the face of Russian jamming. But combat realities seemingly play little role in Hicks’ vaulting vision, which soars over mundane issues such as payload (tiny in the case of the Switchblade 300) to the new frontiers of artificial intelligence. As she declared in March: “That is about what the services are going to be able to do on autonomy [i.e. A.I.] once we’re able to lower those barriers through that initial investment.”