Our next 911 may be a drone attack of some sorts and/or an assassination hit on US soil in near future. Hope not, but the drone tech has really accelerated, now in heavy test trials as we've all been watching.
Pentagon eyes $1 billion over 2 years for Replicator mass drone fleet concept
“There was a debate which ... about so-called ‘reveal, conceal’ [and] how much detail we want to put out,” said Under Secretary of Defense Comptroller Mike McCord. "We're sort of leaning on the side of not disclosing the details..."
The stated goal of Replicator, which Hicks announced last year, is to deliver thousands of relatively low-cost, “attritable” autonomous systems across multiple domains in 18 to 24 months to help the Pentagon counter China’s military buildup.
Pentagon eyes $1 billion over 2 years for Replicator mass drone fleet concept
“There was a debate which ... about so-called ‘reveal, conceal’ [and] how much detail we want to put out,” said Under Secretary of Defense Comptroller Mike McCord. "We're sort of leaning on the side of not disclosing the details..."
The stated goal of Replicator, which Hicks announced last year, is to deliver thousands of relatively low-cost, “attritable” autonomous systems across multiple domains in 18 to 24 months to help the Pentagon counter China’s military buildup.
Quote:Replicator is not a one-time project. As Ms Hicks explained, “[t]he ‘replication’ isn’t just about production. We also aim to replicate and inculcate how we will achieve that goal, so we can scale whatever is most efficient, effective and relevant in the future, again and again.”
To achieve its goal, Replicator “will help overcome the production valley of death” as described by two commentators as:
Sound[ing] like a place where vultures wheel in the hot desert air over the carcasses of the technologies that couldn’t make it across. It’s an apt metaphor, but the valley of death is not a place. It’s a condition.
The metaphor is applied to a wide range of products, including both incremental improvements and disruptive innovations, in many industrial and public settings. As a major developer and user of new technologies, DOD suffers greatly from the valley of death. In acquisition, the valley of death is often an unintended byproduct of an aging acquisition system that wasn’t built for the speed of modern innovation.
What it means, generally, when a program is lost in the valley of death is that the program was abandoned for at least one of four primary reasons: financial, technical, doctrinal or organizational culture.
The U.S. DoD Replicator Initiative and the Acquisition Process for Autonomous Weapons
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." – Thomas Sowell