A stated goal of Replicator, a signature project of Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, is to accelerate production and field thousands of “attritable autonomous” systems across multiple domains by August 2025 to help the U.S. armed forces counter China’s military buildup. The Defense Innovation Unit, which falls under the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), is supporting the effort.

Last week, the department announced that it had secured about $500 million for this fiscal year to move forward with tranche one, and it’s requesting an additional $500 million for fiscal 2025.

As DefenseScoop has previously reported, the first tranche includes kamikaze drones, unmanned surface vessels and counter-drone systems. Pentagon officials are already looking ahead at the second tranche, which is intended to help the services field additional platforms and supporting technologies such as command and control, autonomy and other software that are intended to boost the overall effectiveness and collaboration of these systems.

“One of the things that that has been underscored in this committee is that OSD-led efforts have a clear path to be fielded at scale, which is really the responsibility of the military services. Drones or other innovative capabilities just can’t be bought — they [also] need to be incorporated into the tactics and the procedures for how the military services prepare and fight … as well as being maintained and modernized,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said during a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense hearing on Thursday.

She asked DOD acquisition leaders who were testifying whether there is sufficient rigor to ensure that efforts like Replicator and other OSD-spearheaded efforts have robust transition plans that include how the services are going to employ, field and maintain systems at scale.

“By asking the question, senator, you’re actually making a really, really important point. The services lead on fielding at scale and organize, train and equip. Not OSD — not OSD. And so what’s really, really important is much beyond the technology and the widget, is what we call DOTMILPF — the doctrine, the training, the operations. Otherwise, it just doesn’t really matter,” Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment William LaPlante replied.

To be successful, the services need to be ready to sustain capabilities that are cranked out in large numbers, he noted.

Doug Bush, the Army’s acquisition chief, has applauded the Replicator initiative for putting the service in a better position to accelerate its new LASSO program with the production of more Switchblade 600 drones, which are manufactured by AeroVironment.

During Wednesday’s hearing, he noted that Replicator is tightly coupled with an official Army program, which gives it a clear path for scaling.

Nickolas Guertin, the acquisition chief for the Department of the Navy, said the sea services are supportive of Replicator, but it’s not just a matter of scaling production.

“We actually brought two Navy and one Marine Corps projects to the first tranche of Replicator in partnership with OSD, and … that partnership is critical to fielding at scale,” he told lawmakers.  “One other aspect to that is when we’re looking at these kinds of initiatives, we want to make sure we carry forward the sustainability and support work to make sure that our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, guardians can actually use this stuff in a reliable way when they need to in a fight.”

The Navy is pursuing multiple types of unmanned surface vessels via Replicator, including through a partnership with the Defense Innovation Unit via DIU’s Production-Ready, Inexpensive, Maritime Expeditionary (PRIME) commercial solutions opening. Contracts are expected to be awarded this summer.

Additionally, Anduril’s Wide-Area Infrared System for Persistent Surveillance (WISP) counter-drone technology was tapped for ramped-up production in association with efforts put forth by the Marine Corps’ Ground Based Air Defense program.

The 2024 Further Consolidated Appropriations Act, which Congress passed in March, included a provision that requires the Pentagon to brief Congress on the concept of operations, updated spending profiles and requirements for sustaining each system — through fiscal 2029 — that’s been selected to receive Replicator funding.

In a call earlier this month, DOD officials acknowledged that the Pentagon has a lot more work to do now that funding has been secured for moving ahead with the first tranche.  

“That includes continuing to refine the concept of operation and employment for these capabilities; accelerating the experimentation timelines for individual capabilities, but also the collective portfolio to make sure that we are adequately testing and experimenting the mass effects that that we hope to achieve,” a senior defense official said during the background call with reporters.

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Software factories are proliferating across the Defense Department as a way to rapidly create software in-house for the services. According to Nickolas Guertin, the factories have become essential to the Navy and Marine Corps’ modernization efforts.

“It is my understanding that software factories have become a key piece of the DON’s approach to promulgate a Development, Security, and Operations (DevSecOps) culture which invests in and leverages state-of-the-practice methods such as continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) as a preferred approach to instantiate agile development practices and speed capability to the fleet,” Guertin said in response to advance policy questions from the Senate Armed Services Committee.

If confirmed by the Senate, Guertin will serve as the assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition. He told lawmakers that, if confirmed, he pledges to continue the Navy’s mission to deploy key software capabilities to sailors and Marines.

“As such the community will need to move these capabilities forward while continuing to assess and rationalize the software factory capability ecosystem,” he told the SASC.

There are a few dozen software factories within the Defense Department across the services, including within the Department of the Navy. The Marines have their new Marine Corps Software Factory — which opened its doors this year — and the Navy operates The Forge, a weapons system software factory built on the service’s DevSecOps platform known as Black Pearl.

Last year, the Pentagon published its Software Modernization Strategy as a way to streamline the various software factories across the DOD to support some of its top modernization priorities, like artificial intelligence and Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) — the Pentagon-wide effort to better connect all of the military services’ sensors, shooters and networks.

During his confirmation hearing with lawmakers Wednesday, Guertin emphasized the growing importance of software capabilities as the Navy and Marine Corps continue to modernize by developing new technologies.

“We live in a world now where almost everything is software-defined or controlled. Even the way we build purely physical things is done through tools and modeling and numerical analysis done in computers,” he said. “We need to embrace those digital tools used to make these systems.”

Guertin currently serves as the director of operational test and evaluation at the Department of Defense and is responsible for overseeing and reviewing the Pentagon’s tests for its major acquisition programs. In that role, he’s seen a growing trend in using software and digital tools when testing new platforms.

“There’s powerful opportunities to take advantage of and make sure we bring those into how we do that technology development so we can rapidly field capabilities that work and can also be built to scale,” he said.

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The important Navy post has not been filled by a Senate-confirmed official since James “Hondo” Geurts stepped down as assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition near the end of the Trump administration. Frederick Stefany has been serving as the acting assistant secretary for RD&A since January 2021.

Guertin is currently the director of operational test and evaluation of U.S. military weapon systems in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His nomination must be confirmed by the Senate before he can take on the Navy leadership role.

“He has an extensive four-decade combined military and civilian career in submarine operations, ship construction and maintenance, development and testing of weapons, sensors, combat management products including the improvement of systems engineering, and defense acquisition,” the White House said in the Friday announcement.

Notably, Guertin has previously been involved in applied research for government and academia in “software-reliant and cyber-physical systems” at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute, according to his Defense Department bio.

His nomination comes as the Navy, and the Defense Department writ large, are putting more emphasis on software and cyber capabilities as the Pentagon pursues concepts like Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), which the Navy is contributing to as part of its secretive Project Overmatch effort.

“Over his career, [Guertin] has been in leadership roles of organizational transformation, improving competition, application of modular open system approaches, as well as prototyping and experimentation. He has also researched and published extensively on software-reliant system design, testing, and acquisition,” the White House said.

He previously served in the Navy Reserve as an engineering duty officer.

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Speaking on the Monday edition of The Daily Scoop Podcast, Nickolas Guertin, the Department of Defense’s director of operational test and evaluation, said that many organizations within the DOD are still not compliant with standards to harden their systems against internal and external cyber threats.

“There’s so many programs out there that are underperforming in this area, and they can do a lot with not that much effort to improve the overall department’s posture in cyber survivability,” he said.

Guertin said these are very achievable requirements, adding his organization is going to “hold the line” and say, “If you can’t do this level of cyber survivability, then when you show up to the war fight, you are not doing the warfighter any good because they might be exposed and weapon systems might not work the way we need them to. So you have to meet that barrier.”

He said shifting from a mindset of cyber hygiene to survivability could be one way to get the point across better to commanders and other senior leaders.

Pointing to a conversation he had with the deputy secretary of defense, he recalled a Marine Corps general saying personnel can’t get excited about cyber hygiene.

“We need to get the warfighters excited, and they’re all excited about surviving,” Guertin said. “We’re elevating the visibility, changing the discussion, but not really changing the requirements there. Most of them are not that hard to meet.”

Some of the standards organizations have to meet are simple housekeeping items such as making sure that systems are reasonably secured against insider threats. Others involve ensuring software is up to date and managed and that organizations look at their vulnerabilities relative to their software bill of materials.

“There is just some general practices that are not being adhered to coherently across the joint force and we need to bring that visibility so we can have some transparency and change the game,” he said. “I think some of the work that the department is doing under the auspices of zero trust, for instance, how do we think about weapons systems that can fight through a cyberattack? I mean, the opponents are persistent and omnipresent and you can’t pretend like you’re not going to get impacted by that machine that’s out there that’s trying to get at our systems.”

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