US to build drone force, with an eye on China, Pentagon official says – South China Morning Post Feedzy

The US military intends to field thousands of drones within the next two years, a programme analysts called a significant move for possible conflicts in the Taiwan Strait, where the low-cost and mass-deployed unmanned systems could put pressure on Beijing.

This week, the Pentagon announced a new initiative dubbed Replicator, which aims to field “attritable autonomous systems” at scale of “multiple thousands in multiple domains” within the next 18 to 24 months.

“Replicator is meant to help us overcome the PRC [People’s Republic of China]’s biggest advantage, which is mass: more ships, more missiles, more people,” Deputy Secretary of Defence Kathleen Hicks said on Monday.

“We’ll counter the PLA’s mass with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit and harder to beat,” Hicks told a National Defence Industrial Association conference in Washington.

The US has long invested in autonomous systems, including self-piloting ships and no-crew aircraft.

Hicks noted that the Replicator initiative would take all-domain, attritable autonomy to the next level, she contended: to “produce and deliver capabilities to warfighters at the volume and velocity required to deter aggression – or win if we’re forced to fight”.

The initiative would be “less expensive, put fewer people in the line of fire, and can be changed, updated or improved with substantially shorter lead times”, she said.

Analysts said that the initiative, built on lessons from the Ukraine war, shows a new level of US interest in using drones in combat.

“The Ukraine war has illustrated the value of low-cost, mass-produced drones. The US aims to build on that lesson with Replicator – rather than invest mainly in a small number of expensive platforms that are difficult to replace, ” Chris Meserole, director of the Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative at the Brookings Institution, said.

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Replicator, Meserole said, shows that the US Defence Department seeks to “grow its capacity to produce relatively cheap, replaceable systems at a scale”.

And he said, the programme seemed to fit in with any US response to hostilities in and around Taiwan: “Given China’s capacity for precision strikes in and around the Taiwan Strait, in theory a programme like Replicator makes a great deal of sense – though how well it is executed remains to be seen.”

The announcement of the new initiative came after Chinese and US senior military officials met at the 2023 Chiefs of Defence conference in Fiji in mid-August, a rare engagement after the suspension of high-level talks between the two militaries last year.

On Thursday the Pentagon confirmed that Admiral John Aquilino, commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, met with Chinese officials at the conference, while China’s defence ministry earlier confirmed that General Xu Qiling, the deputy chief of staff in the Joint Staff Department of the Central Military Commission, China’s top defence command body, attended the Fiji conference and met with representatives from countries including the US.

“We’re going to continue to do everything we can do on our part to maintain open lines of communication to reduce the potential for miscalculation,” a Pentagon spokesman said, adding the US did not want “a relationship that results in conflict”.

China is modernising its military to achieve goals set for the centenary of the People’s Liberation Army in 2027 and to become a world-class force by 2050.

The PLA has the world’s largest navy, with an overall battle fleet of about 340 ships and submarines; roughly 975,000 active-duty personnel in combat units; more than 2,800 combat aircraft; and continues to modernise its air force, according to the Pentagon’s 2022 China Military Power Report.

A US response to that build-up, said, Sam Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Centre for Security and Emerging Technology, could include deploying a large number of drones, both to put cost pressure on China and to enhance its own air capabilities in the battlefield.

The US has “highly expensive and exquisite systems” like aircraft carriers, which China could counter in a less expensive way, Bresnick said: “You use a carrier-killing missile – it’s obviously way less expensive than an aircraft carrier.”

“So what the US, I believe, is trying to do with this drone programme is to put the burden of the costs back on China,” he said.

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“In a hypothetical conflict, you’re giving China a choice, which is essentially using much more expensive missiles to attack those drones … or China to say, ‘We don’t want to spend the money, we’re going to ignore a lot of those drones.'”

That, Bresnick said, would give the US “a big advantage” since then the drones could be used for intelligence reconnaissance surveillance.

The implementation of the new initiative, though, might be tricky, analysts said.

Travis Sharp, a fellow at the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said it would require “big changes” redesigning the structure of squadrons, having pilots of manned aircraft comfortable operating autonomous vehicles.

“These are huge organisational and cultural changes,” Sharp said at Brookings on Wednesday.