Christopher Kirchhoff: evaluation

Transcript context

…Can you imagine the Pentagon having a process like that? I don’t mean at this moment, but if matters were somehow more dire for us, is there a way we could do something like that? Or it would just never happen? Well, the Pentagon is trying. A few months ago, they announced something called the Replicator initiative, led by Defense Innovation Unit, which is a push to develop autonomous swarming drones in the air and on sea and undersea, also. But an important caveat to that — this is an initiative that was announced more than a year after the start of the Ukraine war, which tells you we’re playing catch-up. And because it was announced outside the budget cycle, they’ve had to go around and bureaucratically pull money from other programs, which is a whole extra step. And if you add up all the money that the Pentagon is spending on a Replicator, it’s less than a percent of the procurement spend of the Pentagon. I think the question is, that program is directionally right, but it certainly is not right in size or scale in comparison to the changes we’re seeing, not just in Ukraine, but in the Middle East and other places around the world with autonomous weapon systems. Say our forces had greater immediate combat responsibilities than is currently the case, though there are some now, as of course you know. Is it laws that would stop us from speeding up tinkering with drones? Or is it cultural inertia in institutions? What’s the relative balance there?…

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