The Pentagon's Replicator initiative was supposed to be America's answer to the drone revolution - a program designed to field thousands of autonomous systems by mid-2025. It delivered only hundreds. Worse, even those systems came without the operational concepts needed to actually fight with them, David Petraeus and Isaac Flanagan argue in a damning assessment.
In a Foreign Affairs essay reported by "Hvylya", Petraeus and Flanagan single out the program as a symbol of a systemic failure.
Replicator's shortfall, the authors contend, is symptomatic of a deeper institutional blind spot. The program "focused on hardware procurement, not the operational concepts for how autonomous formations would actually fight." No joint doctrine for autonomous formations exists. No major command has been tasked with developing one. No dedicated unmanned systems force has been established. "In essence, the U.S. military is buying more drones without adequately considering how coordinated autonomous forces should be structured, coordinated, commanded, and controlled," Petraeus and Flanagan write.
The authors outline what they believe the military must do instead: develop operational and tactical concepts first, codify them into doctrine, redesign organizational structures around human-machine teams rather than grafting autonomous systems onto units built for crewed platforms, educate leaders to command "software-defined subordinates," and train units to execute operations when communications are degraded. All of this must happen before potential adversaries complete their own transformations.
The consequences of inaction are stark. Without radical institutional changes, the U.S. military will field increasingly capable unmanned systems "without any of the concepts, doctrine, organizations, and educated leaders needed to employ them effectively." The result, the authors warn, would be "autonomous trinkets instead of autonomous warfare." Petraeus has previously warned of a "missile math" problem and critical drone defense gaps, while some allies are already giving AI more autonomy in target generation than any U.S. commander has ever had.
Previously: A Pacific War Over Taiwan Could Dwarf Every U.S. Military Disaster Since Vietnam.