Stopping lethal attack drones is focus of Replicator Initiative 2
USNI News
Stopping lethal attack drones is focus of Replicator Initiative 2, says SECDEF Austin
By John Grady
30 September 2024
Graphic identifying specific debris fragments collected by a U.S. Navy explosive ordnance disposal team aboard M/T Pacific Zircon, Nov. 16. The graphic shows how the collected fragments indicate the unmanned aerial vehicle that attacked the commercial tanker was an Iranian-made Shahed-136. US Navy graphic
Taking on lethal attack drones attacking Red Sea shipping and U.S. Army operations in Jordan, Iraq and Syria will be the Defense Department’s focus for Replicator 2, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin wrote in a Friday memo to Pentagon leaders.
Austin directed Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks and Adm. James Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to work with the component service heads through the Innovation Steering Group to develop the plan to be included in the Fiscal Year 2026 budget request.
“My expectation is that Replicator 2 will deliver meaningfully improved C-sUAS [Counter-Small Unmanned Aerial System] protection to critical assets within 24 months of Congress approving funding,” he wrote in the memo.
Merchant shipping and Navy ships in the Red Sea have been facing a twin challenge of land-based anti-ship ballistic missiles and “low-small-slow UAS” swarm attacks since November.
The Iranian-backed Houthis said they were supporting Hamas in its war with Israel and limiting its strikes to ships bound to and from Israel. The attacks from Yemen have been indiscriminate, according to the Pentagon.
The scale and complexity of the attacks at sea were demonstrated in January. Central Command reported Jan. 9 a “complicated attack” in the southern Red Sea on tankers, commercial and naval vessels.
“Eighteen OWA [one-way attack] UAVs, two anti-ship cruise missiles, and one anti-ship ballistic missile were shot down by a combined effort of F/A-18s from USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69), USS Gravely (DDG 107), USS Laboon (DDG 58), USS Mason (DDG 87), and the United Kingdom’s HMS Diamond (D34).” No injuries or damage were reported.
Like others in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill, Grady called the downing of drones costing several thousand dollars with multi-million dollar missiles a bad exchange.
Speaking at the U.S. Naval Institute and Center for Strategic and International Studies event, Grady looked to directed energy as a way forward in the air defense mission at sea. Directed energy means “a drop of fuel becomes a weapon” to destroy attacking unmanned systems.”
The Defense Innovation Unit partnered with the Navy in June soliciting industry proposals for its Counter NEXT proposal. The idea is to quickly develop and deploy unmanned aerial systems for a variety of platforms to down incoming one-way attack drones.
The Defense Intelligence Agency catalogued the disruption in international trade caused by the Houthi missile and drone attacks have taken on Red Sea traffic since October on 28 major shipping companies.
China, heavily reliant on energy imports, is increasingly buying oil and natural gas from Russia and using the Northern Sea Route to avoid the Iranian-back group’s attacks, USNI News reported.
Groups, like ISIS supporting Hamas after its Oct. 7 attack on Israel, began firing one-way armed drones into U.S. Army facilities in Iraq and Syria almost on a daily basis until February.
ABC News reported those attacks largely stopped after Feb. 4 following large-scale U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Syria and a drone strike that killed a top-level leader of the Kataib Hezbollah militia group.
The deadliest attack on Army outposts in the Middle East, however, occurred in Jordan when three soldiers were killed and more than 30 wounded in a January attack by another Iranian-backed militia.
The Washington Post reported that drone may not have been identified because it was so low-flying. The base, known as Tower 22, also was not outfitted with weapons that can ‘’kill” aerial threats like drones. The report said the base “relied on electronic warfare systems designed to disable them or disrupt their path to a target.”
Smaller-scale attacks resumed this summer, including one on Rumalyn Landing Zone in Syria and Al-Asad air base. The Aug. 9 drone strike in Syria injured five American service members.
In his memo, Austin added, “the expectation is that Replicator 2 will assist with overcoming challenges we face in the areas of production capacity, technology innovation, authorities, policies, open system architecture and system integration, and force structure.”
The department’s and services’ approach to countering the small drones that fly at about 180-feet altitude with speeds about 250 miles per hour has been layered – electronic warfare and kinetic effects.
These drones have been validated as “as joint capability gaps” that Replicator 2 can close, Austin wrote.
Stressing force protection, Austin added, “the Replicator process can provide the greatest value against our most urgent needs.”
Hicks, in announcing the replicator initiative in August 2023, said the original target was to overcome Chinese advantages in security areas with mass.
“All-domain, attritable autonomous systems will overcome the challenge of anti-access, area-denial,” she said