The Pentagon has spent three years trying to prove it can buy autonomy at the speed adversaries move, first through the Replicator initiative and now through the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group inside SOCOM. The results have been uneven — Replicator 1 delivered "hundreds," not the promised "thousands," of attritable systems by its own 2025 deadline, per the Congressional Research Service. But the acquisition machinery keeps grinding forward: DOD announced its first Replicator 2 award in January, and the Navy keeps signing standalone unmanned-systems and C5ISR task orders regardless of how the flagship initiative is graded politically. That steady drip of task orders, not the marquee program, is the actual mechanism moving money — and it lands on contractors who already hold hulls, sensors, and software integration contracts, not new entrants.
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