🔷 Replicator Report Card

Replicator:
Did it Deliver?

On August 28, 2023, the Pentagon announced the Replicator initiative: an ambitious plan to field thousands of uncrewed, attritable systems across domains by August 2025.

The idea was two-fold: 1) flood the battlespace with affordable autonomous systems to counter China’s mass advantage, and 2) simultaneously accelerate the Pentagon’s lagging innovation cycles.

It’s now been 24 months—did it deliver?

Slow Start

Because Replicator was announced before plans were put in place, it took the Pentagon 5 months to narrow down the capabilities to pursue and develop a plan to fund it all.

The Systems: By February 2024, the first selection of systems slowly started to take shape across two tranches (Replicator “1.1” and “1.2”), and by May, systems were selected, though some have been more public than others. Here’s a breakdown:

• Loitering munitions: AeroVironment’s Switchblade-600 & Anduril’s Altius-600 to give infantry portable precision strike

• Small ISR: company-level drones (Anduril Ghost-X & PDW C-100) for local ISR

• Maritime: Uncrewed maritime systems for surface (USV) and sub-surface (UUV) ISR and strike (Saronic, Anduril Dive-LD)

• Low-Cost Cruise Missiles: DIU helped fund the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle prototyping effort to explore modular, scalable, low-cost cruise missiles

• Autonomy: over-arching Autonomous Collaborative Teaming (ACT) to tie all the systems together (Anduril’s Lattice)

The Funding: Replicator wasn’t a formal “program of record.” Instead, it leaned on reprogrammed dollars and congressional adds—about $300M in 2023 to get moving, with roughly $500M annually requested for FY24 and FY25. 

A year into the 2-year program, the Pentagon announced Replicator 2 to focus on counter-small uncrewed aerial systems (cUAS).

How’s It Going?

Two years from its very public announcement, did Replicator deliver?

That depends on how you measure success.

Did Replicator field thousands of drones, with autonomy, operating across all domains by August 2025, as the Pentagon very clearly stated it would do?

No.

Fielded quantities are estimated to be in the hundreds, though there are thousands in the production queue. And of those, one system reportedly carries a ton of that weight: over half of all Replicator systems are Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones.

But, recall there were two goals for Replicator—not one—and don’t let the missing of goal #1 to overshadow the success of goal #2.

Did Replicator help disrupt, dislodge, and accelerate the Pentagon’s glacial innovation cycle?

Yes!

Replicator proved the Pentagon could structure rapid contracts, quick competitions, and that small and non-traditional defense companies could win real production contracts.

Hundreds of companies and solutions were evaluated, and 30+ contracts have been awarded—a whopping 75% of those to non-traditional firms.

The Legacy

Beyond the scorecard, Replicator’s real legacy is hard to measure but easy to see: a culture change.

Changing culture takes time—and 2 years of the Replicator drumbeat may have done it.

Replicator provided a clear signal to the industry, giving several start-ups the confidence to enter the defense market, investors the confidence to back those companies, and established companies the confidence to make big bets on products and production capacity.

As if it were a story-book ending, in July 2025—23 months after Replicator first made headlines—the Pentagon announced the “Unleashing Drone Dominance” directive to mandate every service to buy, field, and experiment with drones at an unprecedented scale by 2027.

In That Number

$610M

A $610M price increase on Switzerland’s order of 36 F-35As has sparked a dispute with the US, as rising inflation, raw material costs, and supply chain issues drive Lot 18 F-35 fighter jet costs higher.

TRIVIA

Which of these air defense systems is NOT an acronym?

A) Aegis (Navy)
B) Patriot (Army)
C) Gator (Marine Corps)

On the Radar

Prize competition? The Pentagon is exploring a prize competition to accelerate space-based interceptor (SBI) prototypes for Golden Dome. The plan could offer $100M+ rewards to companies that demonstrate technical feasibility for prototype endo- and exo-atmospheric interceptors with phased tests (hopefully) leading to production contracts sometime after 2028.

• The Merge’s Take: A prize model for SBIs signals urgency—DoW wants rapid innovation beyond traditional contracting for Golden Dome. However, the development costs are so high that it's more likely to restrict entrants than to incentivize them. Prize competitions often signal the repurposing of ‘dual-use tech’, but these are SBIs. Very few firms have the resources and freedom to make such a massive bet over this time horizon—that’s startup territory…if they had mature tech to start with. It would be interesting to see if industry creates any joint ventures or start-up spin-offs to move defense prime tech into a structure that could go bankrupt if they don’t win a production contract. And even if this were economically feasible from an industry perspective, a new report on the sheer volume of SBIs required could make the concept infeasible.

Drone policy change. The US officially changed its policy for the export of unmanned aerial systems (UAS). For decades, the US categorized larger drones under the restrictive Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR). Now they will be viewed for export consideration the same way a manned fighter jet is, hoping to accelerate approvals.

• The Merge’s Take: We need to provide context before our take. The MTCR was created in 1987 to limit the proliferation of delivery vehicles for weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But the “M” in MCTR is misleading because, in 1992, it was expanded to include drones. This change effectively categorized large drones as nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, killing the international market for General Atomics’ MQ-1/MQ-9 and Northrop Grumman’s RQ-4. Data point: from 2013-2023, China sold 282 combat drones to 17 countries—the US sold 12 to 2 countries over the same period. All because of the overly restrictive MTCR.

• The Merge’s Spicy Take: The MTCR is a non-binding voluntary commitment, and the US could have written this memo at any time in the past 20 years instead of waiting for the damage to be done. Or not? The timing of this policy change and US companies striking international deals for Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) is unlikely to be a coincidence.

They Said It

“The propulsion and aerodynamic properties of the missile … in that F3R variant … always had the capability to go further. We just had not been able to take advantage of it. So at this point, it’s the way we’re flying it. It’s flying higher and longer. We can fly at a much faster speed at release, which just improves the performance of the missile.”

 — Jon Norman, Raytheon vice president of requirements and capabilities, explaining how they got the AIM-120 to fly further

The Show!

ON THE SHOW: We dig into the origin story of how GPS-aided bombs came to be, with a very special guest who helped make it happen.

We cover the past, present, and future, with a ton of details we guarantee you’ve never heard before.

YouTube

Apple

Spotify

Knowledge Bombs

• The Army launched a VC-style FUZE program for military tech investments ($750M per year)

• Artopos came out of stealth mode to reveal a jet-powered autonomous airlifter

• Divergent raised $290M to scale its digital manufacturing platform

• Kratos & NCSIST partnered to introduce the Mighty Hornet IV attack drone in Taiwan

• MGI Engineering unveiled Tigershark, a rocket-launched jet-engined deep-strike drone

• Kelluu’s bus-sized ISR airship is being tested by NATO

• Zone 5 unveiled the White Spike counter-UAS interceptor

• Anduril & Impulse Space are partnering on maneuvering satellites

• Greece might purchase additional F-35s instead of F-16 Block 50 upgrades

• Germany & France are expected to split over disagreements in the FCAS program

💎 Free Merch! 💎 

Don't keep us a secret!
Share the Merge = earn free swag.
It's that simple.

You currently have 0 referrals, only 3 away from receiving Stickers.

Or copy and paste this link: https://themerge.co/subscribe?ref=PLACEHOLDER

ANSWER
A) Aegis is not an acronym—it was named from Greek mythology, where the Aegis was the shield of Zeus and Athena. Gator is the Ground/Air Task Oriented Radar. Patriot is more accurately a backronym for the Phased Array Tracking Radar to Intercept on Target.