The 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment and the Threat Systems Management Office operate a swarm of 40 drones to test the rotational units capabilities during the battle of Razish, National Training Center on May 8th, 2019. (U.S. Army Photo by Pv2 James Newsome)
WEST 2025 — As the Pentagon approaches its two-year deadline to get thousands of autonomous systems operational as part of the Replicator initiative, two Navy officials recently urged the services and the Pentagon to do more to coordinate their efforts, especially when it comes to software used on the systems.
“We do need to sync up on some of these solutions, right? Whether it’s autonomous software, C2 [command and control] software, fight from the [Maritime Operations Center] MOC collaborative, heterogeneous software, we do need to do that,” Director of the Integrated Warfare (N9I) office, Rear Adm. Christopher Sweeney, said on a panel at AFCEA West on Tuesday.
“I can’t have every fleet commander buying their software or their robot. I mean, some of that can happen, obviously, but we do have to settle up,” he later added.
Commander of Naval Information Warfare Systems Command, Rear Adm. Elizabeth Okano, said on the same panel that to implement such an “enterprise level” strategy, not only do Navy fleet commanders have to work together, but the services as a whole must do so too to truly make Replicator a multi-domain operation. Right now, that’s not happening as much as it should, she said.
“We’re not organized correctly,” she said. “We’re not incentivized to work collaboratively together.”
She explained that certain program managers are rewarded on cost schedule performance, not “on connecting the dots and saying, ‘Hey, you know what? This information is really good, and not only is this information good, but I’m going to figure out a way to unlock my information and give it to them [the other services] in a way that’s meaningful for somebody else.”
Chris Brose, chief strategic officer at defense firm Anduril, added that the wider government should be more “assertive” in tracking the software capabilities involved in Replicator.
To do so, Brose envisioned something like “government reference architecture” that serves as a database that keeps track of all the various software the Pentagon is buying and how it will all work together.
“This needs to be something where the government is actually a bit more assertive on some critical things that will set those conditions, from a software perspective, how all of these capability comes together, sort of across that entire mission element, from automatic target recognition to mission level autonomy to the algorithms underlying it, to the different behaviors,” he said. “All of those different things I believe need to be governed by something like a government reference architecture. Something where the government can have confidence in how these pieces are coming together.”
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