Alex Constantine - December 18, 2024
"The government knows what is happening. ... And I think they'd be better off saying what it is our military knows and our president knows." -- Donald Trump
Headline, "An Ocean County sheriff's attempt to track a swarm of roughly 50 drones" - Hindustan Times, Dec. 19, 2024: The sheriff launched a commercially-available drone and attempted to follow them. The mystery UAVs were described as "industrial grade," some with wingspans of eight feet, "trailing a Coast Guard vessel." The swarm easily evaded the sheriff's attempts to track them. The captain of the Coast Guard ship told reporters he had no idea who dispatched the fleet, and accused the government of a "cover-up" ...
By Alex Constantine
The cover stories are all too familiar. The Pentagon doesn't know anything about the drone invasion that began in New Jersey, but a foreign adversary isn't responsible, and they do not constitute a threat. This is the same senseless Kafka word salad served up in the past by the DoD and intelligence community to conceal the classified deployment of UAPs and Havana Syndrome-inducing, brain-interactive neuroweapons.
When the government talks this way, the source of a current Big Mystery probably lurks close to home.
From the military press (including the article attached below), a few things can be gleaned.
- There are two consecutive drone development programs underway this month, Replicator and Replicator 2. The first involves unspecified surveillance and offensive capabilities, the second is counter-offensive. The military is fine-tuning the Replicators and software. When this phase is completed, the drones will be shipped to Ukraine.
. - Initial testing and decision-making were scheduled in the Spring to begin in the fourth quarter of 2024 (now), and end in mid-2025.
- - Scores of military contractors have been given an opportunity to compete for an outlay of hundreds of millions of dollars. The field of candidates has been narrowed to four drone manufacturers.
- The Air Force is launching some of them from Picatinny Arsenal, which supplies Ukraine, and quite possibly from bases in Atlantic City and Wrightstown, NJ -- inland, not offshore. Small Air Force bases in other states are also involved. (Axios gives us: "A Joint Staff spokesperson acknowledged to reporters Saturday that there had been sightings of drones over two New Jersey military installations -- but that's not atypical." Sightings have been reported along the north eastern seaboard, Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio in the vicinity of Wright-Patterson AFB, and California. Imagine the response if a foreign adversary, domestic terrorists, or even a civilian drone enthusiast were responsible.)
- The deadline for making final decisions on the selection of drones, and finishing touches on their development, is tight. So they are being flown, in part, to test their surveillance (a regimen reported by the military press) and control & command capabilities.
- The machines and software are being tailored to meet Ukraine's specified military objectives.
- One goal of the program is to group Replicators in formation. Drones over New Jersey have been spotted flying in formation.
- Congress has been fully apprised of the program. Irate demands from legislators for "transparency" are political theater. On December 16th, officials from the Defense Department briefed the House Intelligence Committee for three hours, behind closed doors. After the briefing, lawmakers said that the UAVs did not pose "an imminent threat," and most most were actually "manned aircraft" and "stars."
- The government is keeping military application details under wraps, according to Aditi Kumar, Deputy Director for Strategy, Policy, and National Security Partnerships at the Pentagon's Defense Innovation Unit, because corporations pursuing the contracts fear that competitors could gain an edge, giving rise to innovation "paralysis."
But this much is already out of the bag and in the public domain:
Replicator ‘on Track’ to Field Thousands of Cheap Drones Within Months
By John A. Tirpak
Air & Space Forces Magazine, Dec. 12, 2024
The first iteration of the Pentagon’s Replicator initiative should achieve its goals of providing thousands of cheap, autonomous platforms in all combat domains by July 2025, the deputy director of the Defense Innovation Unit said Dec. 12.
Aditi Kumar, speaking at the Hudson Institute, said Replicator—the signature initiative of Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks—was planned as a two-year campaign and, after starting in September 2023, should meet its objectives on time.
“We’re in good shape” to provide “multiple thousands of attritable, autonomous systems in multiple domains” within eight months, Kumar said. “Our acquisition enterprise is sprinting, and our commercial vendors are sprinting, to pull these off of the production lines and get them into the hands of the warfighter.”
Replicator was also meant to improve and speed up the Pentagon’s acquisition processes, Kumar added, and the fact that it will meet its deadline is a positive sign on that front.
A second iteration of Replicator, dubbed Replicator 2 and announced by Hicks in September, is “going to be focused on doing exactly the same thing,” but this time focused on a counter-drone capability.
“So now we’re executing both in parallel,” Kumar said.
Lessons from the first Replicator push are already starting to inform the second. Kumar cited one lesson as the need for transparency and consistent communications with industry about “what exactly we’re going after,” and when.
For example, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III announced the Pentagon’s new counter-unmanned system strategy last week, and DIU officials have already held subsequent roundtables with industry and investors to clarify “our demand signal and the types of systems and capabilities that we will be pursuing” with Replicator 2, Kumar said.
“I think that will get us off on the right foot and accelerating quickly with the commercial sector as our partners,” she said.
A second lesson learned is to “start early on the hardest problems, which in many cases are the software problems.” For Replicator 1, “we’re doing a whole host of things related to collaborative autonomy and command and control,” and for Replicator 2, command and control is once again a key challenge.
A third lesson is “early and frequent communications with Congress,” Kumar said. DIU leadership has been on Capitol Hill explaining “what Replicator 2 looks like, what types of capabilities we’re looking to field and in what locations, so that there are early supporters as we think about funding this enormous challenge.”
Asked what the DIU has learned from the Ukraine war, Kumar said combat experience is driving Ukraine to update the software of its systems on increasingly short timelines.
Ukraine’s experience has “been very helpful to us,” demonstrating that “software upgrades need to happen on a three- to four-week timeline, which is incredibly fast and has a cost,” she said. Historically, she said, the Pentagon has not funded software aggressively or pushed updates quickly. That has to change with “significantly different types and magnitude of investment.”
This approach will also help with “some of the paralysis” services sometimes have in committing to a new system because they fear that once they buy it, it will be quickly overtaken by technology or the threat, she said.
Kumar said the big challenges with Replicator and other future systems is ensuring “collaborative” interaction between autonomous systems, and the command-and-control apparatus that links joint systems, so they can cue other services’ platforms and provide situational awareness for the joint enterprise.
Air Force Replicator
While the Air Force did not have systems included in the first round of Replicator systems, Hicks announced a “Replicator 1.2,” or “second tranche” of the Replicator program on Nov. 13. These new systems are meant to “add to the first tranche of selected systems announced earlier in 2024” and are also geared toward an August 2025 fielding target.
The Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle was included in the second tranche, and the service will partner with the DIU and “multiple vendors to develop and demonstrate design variants.” The four companies involved are Anduril Industries; Integrated Solutions for Systems, Inc.; Leidos Dynetics; and Zone 5 Technologies. Selected ETV prototypes will be “accelerated to scaled production,” the Pentagon said in a release accompanying Hicks’ announcement.
Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Slife said the ETV’s modular design and open system architecture “make it an ideal platform for program offices to test out new capabilities at the subsystem level, reducing risk and demonstrating various options for weapon system employment.”
Hicks said Replicator is “demonstrably reducing barriers to innovation, and delivering capabilities to warfighters at a rapid pace.” She also said that of the more than 500 companies that were considered Replicator contracts, more than 30 received them, and of those, some 75 percent are “nontraditional defense contractors.”
Counter-Drone
It remains to be seen whether an Air Force program will be included in Replicator 2, but the service is likely to have some interest in the project. Officials say the Air Force needs to take on the counter-UAS and air defense missions because its Agile Combat Employment model—which will spread out small Air Force units across a wide number of small and austere airfields—will require more air defense assets than the Army seems able to provide. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall recently said he’s “comfortable” taking over air defense “as an organic mission” from the Army.
Ravi Chaudhury, assistant secretary of the Air Force for energy, installations, and the environment, hinted at future developments on that front at an AFA Warfighters in Action event on Dec. 11
“We’re busy putting together what that’s going to look like going forward,” he said. ” … More to follow” but “we’re talking about it very, very intently and deliberately at the Pentagon to decide what we’re going to do about our installations and this particular challenge,” and that there may be something to announce “in the not too distant future.”