Astonishingly hard to find out exactly what this system is. I read several defense articles and they go out of their way to use arms manufacturer jargon and never say what the system is or what it does. Just mumbo jumbo about getting lots of things into the hands of “warfighters” (gotta love that disassociative term) quickly.
It’s a program, not a product. Like ‘loyal wingman’ or ‘joint strike fighter’. It’s a nipple full of money where BAE, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin will suckle at for a decade or so before a product or set of products is chosen.
Ah, thanks. So just another rebranded money suck, as you said.
Eventually something will come out of it. Maybe a few things.
Most likely a mesh battle-net for AI autonomous one-way drones. A way for the military to target an incoming adversarial thing without manually designating a kill vehicle like an SM-3 or whatever. It will be more like a job posting - the incoming target is designated, and whatever gadget is in the area most suited to take it out sallies forth. If that thing gets shot down or fails, the drones all have a chat amongst themselves and another gizmo picks up the job and has a try. So the kill vehicles don’t really matter, what matters is that the job gets completed autonomously. The job replicates across the battle-net untill success. But this happens on an extremely complex battleground, with thousands of drones, missiles, interceptors and other assets all juggling thousands of jobs. At least, that’s my takeaway from what I’ve read.
Much like Joint Strike Fighter was a Program, X-35 was one of a few projects, and F-35 was the product. Replicator is the program, there will probably be a dozen projects competing to solve the requirements, and then maybe a few products at the end that go into mass production.
Ted Faro is making excited noises.
Just skip a couple of steps, and nuke the whole world. We are overdue for a hard reset. Maybe the next civilisation won’t fuck up so badly.
May the raccoons treat the world better than we have.