"We must ensure the PRC [People's Republic of China] leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression and concludes, 'today is not the day' — and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, 2035, 2049 and beyond," Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks said recently at the National Defense Industrial Association's Emerging Technologies for Defense conference held in Washington D.C.
Her comments directly addressing the Chinese government stand in contrast to just a few years ago when DOD officials would speak in euphemisms about "readiness" or "lethality" without ever mentioning who or what the U.S. military was preparing to confront.
In order to counter Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific region Hicks explained that the DOD has little desire to match the Chinese ship for ship or fighter plane for fighter plane.
America will, "out-match adversaries by out-thinking, out-strategizing and out-maneuvering them," she said.
In order to achieve this, she announced the replicator initiative which sims to field thousands of autonomous systems across multiple domains, air, land, and sea.
"Now is the time to take all-domain, attritable autonomy to the next level: to produce and deliver capabilities to warfighters at the volume and velocity required to deter aggression, or win if we're forced to fight," Hicks said at the conference.
She explained that China's greatest strategic advantage is mass, and in order to counter that the DOD will lean heavily on autonomous systems, like drones.
"[W]hen the time is right, and when we apply enough leadership, energy, urgency and depth of focus, we can get it done. That's what America does," she said.
Reach Jack Murphy: jack@connectingvets.com or @JackMurphyRGR.
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