The first tranche of the US Navy’s “Replicator” initiative aimed at obstructing a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be ready by August, a US Naval Institute (USNI) News report on Tuesday said.
The initiative is part of a larger defense strategy for Taiwan, and would involve launching thousands of uncrewed submarines, surface vessels and aerial vehicles around Taiwan to buy the nation and its partners time to assemble a response.
The plan was first made public by the Washington Post in June last year, when it cited comments by US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue defense forum in Singapore.
USNI News cited Captain Alex Campbell, the maritime portfolio director of the US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit, as saying that the initiative involves integrating various systems in a fast-paced manner through the use of common software.
His team is trying to stitch together “a pretty wide and diverse set of systems and a wide and diverse set of software, and smashing them all together at a pace that is really more akin to commercial software tempos,” Campbell said.
The report also cited US Pacific Fleet Commander Admiral Steve Koehler as saying he wanted “more lethal and inexpensive systems” available for the initiative, and that he wanted them “in the hands of sailors to experiment with and field quickly.”
Replicator, for which the US Navy has budgeted US$1 billion, would make use of uncrewed systems in every domain, including one-way attack drones and loitering munitions.
The overall strategy would also involve intelligence gathering, and the use of infrastructure to support a GPS and intelligence denied environment, a previous report by Naval News said.
Connected by satellites, high-altitude long-endurance uncrewed aerial vehicles and other networked systems would engage large amphibious fleets crossing the Taiwan Strait from multiple vectors, with the US drones coming from islands, undersea and from drone motherships far outside the first island chain, that report said.
The Replicator program has prompted the US military to rethink the use of autonomous combat systems, and emphasize learning and rapid adjustments to meet future battlefield needs, US Navy Director of Integrated Warfare Rear Admiral Christopher Sweeney said.
Chris Brose, strategic director of defense contractor Anduril Industries, said that with Replicator, the navy also aims to “quickly field disparate systems,” and to adopt a more flexible development approach to ensure that the technology could be quickly put into actual combat applications in the Taiwan Strait.
Koehler said the US military should deploy more “low-cost and high-lethality” uncrewed systems, and that troops should conduct combat tests and exercises with such systems in the Strait.
In related news, the Ministry of National Defense yesterday reported that seven Chinese military aircraft were detected in the Taiwan Strait in the 24-hour period from 6am on Thursday to 6am yesterday, five of which crossed the median line of the Strait, moving toward areas to the north and southwest of Taiwan’s airspace.
