A.I. and the Next Generation of Drone Warfare

On August 28th, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Kathleen Hicks, announced what she called the Replicator initiative--an all-hands-on-deck effort to modernize the American arsenal by adding fleets of artificially intelligent, unmanned, relatively cheap weapons and equipment. She described these machines as "attritable," meaning that they can suffer attrition without compromising a mission. Imagine a swarm of hundreds or even thousands of unmanned aerial drones, communicating with each other as they collect intelligence on enemy-troop movements, and you will begin to understand the Deputy Secretary's vision for Replicator. Even if a sizable number of the drones were shot down, the information they'd gathered would have already been recorded and sent back to human operators on the ground. In one sense, Hicks's announcement, during an address titled "The Urgency to Innovate" at a meeting of National Defense Industrial Association, did not signal a wholly new approach.