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The U.S. Navy is currently losing its war with the Yemeni Houthis for control of the Red Sea, despite having expended $1 billion on missiles and airstrikes. Traffic on the vital waterway is down 70% , while traffic at Israel’s Eilat port is at a complete standstill. But the Admirals would prefer we focus on their vision of vast armadas of artificially intelligent drones thronging the air and waters around Taiwan, all “networked” by the Defense Joint All-Domain Command and Control system. In the words of Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo, this will create an “unmanned hellscape,” for any Chinese invasion force, rendering their lives “utterly miserable.”
Central to this vision is the “Replicator Initiative,” the cherished hobby-horse of Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks. In an acronym-gorged address in August 2023, Hicks outlined how Chinese superiority in numbers would be countered, with “thousands” of “All-Domain, Attritable Autonomous (ADA2) systems” which would overcome “the challenge of anti-access, area-denial systems. Our ADA2 to thwart their A2AD,” all within two years.
To thwart unwelcome taxpayer enquiries regarding pertinent details of the program, such as cost and where the money will actually go, Replicator is entirely “black,” cloaked in classification. In March this year Hicks stated it would cost a total of $1 billion evenly split between 2024 and 2025, a tellingly vague figure. Veteran Pentagon analyst Chuck Spinney pithily summarized this news, “the vagueness speaks for itself,” he told me. “These figures are meaningless, other than they are too low.”
We are equally ill-informed as to what Hicks’ magic ADA2 drones will actually consist of, though there are suggestions the bulk of them might be the small Switchblade drones developed and marketed by the AeroEnvironment corporation. These have seen service in Ukraine, but have been largely discarded by the Ukrainians as essentially useless in the face of Russian jamming. But combat realities seemingly play little role in Hicks’ vaulting vision, which soars over mundane issues such as payload (tiny in the case of the Switchblade 300) to the new frontiers of artificial intelligence. As she declared in March: “That is about what the services are going to be able to do on autonomy [i.e. A.I.] once we’re able to lower those barriers through that initial investment.”
Pushing our way through the overblown rhetoric, we can see that Replicator is the shape of a lot of awful things to come. The program is under the aegis of the Defense Innovation Unit, created by the Pentagon in 2014 and sited in the heart of Silicon Valley as a gateway through which the eponymous tech industry could reach into the Pentagon budget as a member in good standing of the military industrial complex. Irksome constraints on Pentagon weapons procurement as traditionally practiced, such as a modicum of oversight and transparency, will be swept aside. So far, this initiative has been a great success, at least for the wallets of interested parties such as retiring senior military officers who have been eagerly flocking to well-remunerated tech company perches. Scenting rich bounty from the spigot of ever-increasing Pentagon budgets, investors have poured funds into nascent companies that promise great things from their “innovative” and “disruptive” approach to weapons development. According to a 2023 Pitchbook report, venture capital investment in defense tech startups is growing at a compounded rate of 16 percent a year and expected to hit $185 billion by 2027.
The appetite for defense investment should come as no surprise, given ominous signs that the titanic revenue stream from commercial tech, spurred by innovation, has begun to ebb, even in the case of AI, the technology that was supposed to overturn our way of life and reap gigantic profits for all. OpenAI launched a tsunami of hype when it unveiled GhatGPT in November 2022. But it is now becoming ever more apparent that there is a lot less to AI than met the headlines, especially given its apparently intractable problem of “hallucinations” - AKA making things up.
Eric Hisdon has neatly delineated the true state of affairs in what he dubs “the rot com bubble,”
Today, we're being told that our glorious AI-powered future is imminent, yet what we've actually got is unprofitable, unsustainable generative AI that has an unassailable problem of spitting out incorrect information, which Google CEO Sundar Pichai says is "an inherent feature" of a technology he's now plugged into Google Search, generating hilariously incorrect "answers" to queries based on the links of a decaying search engine. And at the forefront of the AI boom is Sam Altman's $80 billion juggernaut OpenAI, a company that allegedly will build "artificial general intelligence" that experiences human-like cognition, an idea that is simply not possible based on how generative AI works.
The AI expectations boom was of course preceeded by the virtual reality expectations boom, into which Mark Zuckerberg sank $36 billion in the hope that we would all cheerfully retire to a virtual reality “metaverse,” which turned out not to be the case. Microsoft thought so too, to which end they developed the Hololens virtual reality headset. Customers stayed away in droves, but, rescue was at hand in the shape of the U.S. Army, which has obligingly come through with a $23 billion contract for the Integrated Augmented Vision System, based on the commercially disastrous Hololens, and touted as endowing the poor bloody infantryman with an omniscient awareness of everything that’s going on on the battlefield. Early tests revealed that the cumbersome apparatus made soldiers sick and disorientated, but the Army continues to pour money into the project.
And there we have it. As the tech economy overall, increasingly bereft of innovative ideas slows down - traffic to Google, Facebook, Twitter has been falling for years - Silicon Valley is moving into the safe harbor of the Pentagon budget bearing promises of magic weapons sure to make an enemy utterly miserable. It should steer clear of the Red Sea though. That’s already a hellscape.