Pentagon buys two new types of drones under Replicator initiative

By Mike Stone

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon announced on Wednesday that it will add two new types of drones and more networking software to its ambitious Replicator initiative aimed at rapidly putting thousands of drones in the hands of the military.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said the Anduril Industries Ghost-X and the Performance Drone Works C-100 UAS were selected under the Replicator program to help fill the Army’s Company-Level Small UAS effort.

The Replicator initiative, announced last year, is an ambitious effort to quickly muster and deploy large numbers of cheap drones by August 2025. The Pentagon targeted spending $500 million annually on the plan to network and task thousands of cheap, smart combat drones for any future conflict.

The Replicator 1 initiative was designed to be a “pathfinder” to a new way for the Pentagon to quickly solve a hard problem, something which President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration may use to streamline defense acquisition.

A future second iteration of Replicator, dubbed Replicator 2 will address how to defeat enemy drones.

Today’s announcement is for the second tranche of buys under the Replicator 1 initiative.

The first tranche included AeroVironment (NASDAQ:) Inc’s Switchblade 600 loitering munition system uncrewed surface vehicles (USV), which are capable of circling a target while waiting for the opportune moment to strike. It also included uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) and counter-uncrewed aerial systems (c-UAS) of various sizes and payloads from several vendors.

Classified systems, including low-cost long-range strike capabilities, are also part of today’s “Replicator 1.2” announcement, though they were not named.