Deadly and Imminent: The Pentagon’s Mad Dash for Silicon Valley’s AI Weapons
January 25th, 2025Anduril even made an anime about it:
Via: Public Citizen:
In August 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced a new Pentagon initiative called Replicator. The initiative is a flagship of the Defense Innovation Unit within the Department of Defense, a team tasked with fast-tracking the development and acquisition of new national security technologies for the Pentagon. According to the Pentagon’s official statements, the program has a two-year mandate to field hundreds of attritable, all-domain weapons systems, in order to hamstring China on its Eastern coast and enable the U.S. to better defend Taiwan from an invasion by China. “Attritable” is Pentagon-speak indicating that the weapons can be produced at low cost and can be replaced inexpensively if downed in combat. Essentially, Replicator aims to source and scale production of small, low-cost weapons (many of which are drone units) capable of swarming a shoreline or set of targets.
