Source: The Intercept
by Nick Turse
“Worried about a potential war with China, the Pentagon is turning to a new class of weapons to fight the numerically superior People’s Liberation Army: drones, lots and lots of drones. In August 2023, the Defense Department unveiled Replicator, its initiative to field thousands of ‘all-domain, attritable autonomous (ADA2) systems’: Pentagon-speak for low-cost (and potentially AI-driven) machines — in the form of self-piloting ships, large robot aircraft, and swarms of smaller kamikaze drones — that they can use and lose en masse to overwhelm Chinese forces. … While U.S. drones have relied on human operators to conduct lethal strikes — many times with disastrous results — advances in artificial intelligence have increasingly raised the possibility of robot planes, in various nations’ arsenals, selecting their own targets.” (06/17/24)
https://theintercept.com/2024/06/17/pentagon-ai-kamikaze-cheap-drones-replicator/