The US Military Is Getting Smaller, Cheaper and Smarter
A new drone-swarm initiative called Replicator will use low-cost technology to counter China’s massive arms buildup.
South Korea has its own drone swarms.
Photographer: Yelim Lee/AFP/Getty Images
In Eric Frank Russell’s classic 1957 science fiction novel Wasp, an interplanetary war is ultimately decided by the use of individual killers operating behind enemy lines, each of which can “sting” with vicious power. In more recent novels — Ghost Fleet, by Peter Singer and August Cole, and my own 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, co-written with Elliot Ackerman — a conflict between China and the US features the use of small clouds of wasp-like unmanned vehicles.
Now the US Defense Department has committed to turning fiction into reality. Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced a plan to create thousands of autonomous unmanned systems over the next two years to compete with China — which is already moving ahead of us. Called “Replicator,” the program will “galvanize progress in the too-slow shift of US military innovation to leverage platforms that are small, smart, cheap and many,” said Hicks.