AUVSI Defense 2024: Day One

Opening remarks as prepared by Michael Robbins, Chief Advocacy Officer, for AUVSI Defense on February 21, 2024:

Welcome to AUVSI Defense. I am Michael Robbins with AUVSI, and I want to begin by thanking you for being here with us today.  

I also want to thank our sponsors for their support in helping us host this event – DZYNE Technologies, Orqa FPV, Skydio, and Shield AI.  

I also want to thank our host – the MITRE Corporation – for allowing us to use your amazing facility. We appreciate the partnership between AUVSI and MITRE, and the great work we do together for our warfighters and to advance AUVSI member technologies in all domains in the commercial, civil, and defense sectors. 

Over the next two days, we have a terrific line up of speakers, with much of the conversation today focusing on manufacturing capacity and the defense industrial base, and tomorrow focusing on the integration of autonomy and AI in the armed services.  

This week’s thought leadership event is part of an ongoing series of events we have been hosting over the last several years.  

When we hosted our last open AUVSI Defense event 5 months ago, I spent a portion of my remarks on the hope and promise of the, at the time 3-week-old Replicator initiative, as a way of getting our portion of the defense industry – unmanned and autonomous systems – moving towards more rapid acquisition and integration, as well as bringing much needed attention to very acute supply chain and production challenges.  

I pledged that AUVSI would play a leading role in helping to shape Replicator and communicate information both directions– between our members and the DoD, and from the DoD to our members. I can say with complete confidence that we have lived up to that promise.

No organization has worked harder or been more successful in engaging all stakeholders in helping to make Replicator and its underlying goals understood, and, ultimately, we believe, successful.

Not that we are claiming Mission Accomplished yet… far from it. But we are trending positive.  

And that is vitally important – Replicator, and more importantly the goals it set forth, need to be a success for the U.S. to maintain our global advantages.

The U.S. is indisputably the world leader in S&T, commercial technology innovation, and transferring commercial technology into military capability.

However, as I noted 5 months ago, the United States has lost the advantage in our industrial base to the PRC. Looking to history as a guide, this is not an indicator of future success. 

Last September, I focused my remarks largely on the INDOPACOM region, because after all, as a nation we’ve been attempting to pivot to the Pacific for almost a generation now, but with only limited success.  

As I noted, from small drones to highly capable warships, the PRC is building at a pace that is not only leaving the United States behind but is putting us at such a severe disadvantage that it requires immediate national attention and a whole-of-government effort to address.    

As multiple unclassified war games have demonstrated, our ability today to field the volume of platforms and weapons required to compete in the South China Sea is not there.

And the industrial base to support the rapid arming and rearming is not there. As an early draft of the National Defense Industrial Strategy noted, the U.S. defense industrial base “does not possess the capacity, capability, responsiveness, or resilience required to satisfy the full range of military production needs at speed and scale.” 

This is true for drones as it is for long range precision munitions and ship building, and on and on throughout our defense industry. 

And let’s be clear, this is not just a strategic deterrence challenge, or a theoretical problem for a future conflict.

The war of attrition in Ukraine is shining a spotlight on the deficiencies of our own industrial base, as well as the shortfalls of European and Ukrainian organic production capabilities.  

We are not likely to face a future where warfare is limited to a single part of the world – already today we are trying to arm allies in 3 AORs – Israel in CENTOM, Ukraine in EUCOM, and Taiwan in INDOPACOM – while maintain our own readiness and warfighting capacity, including keeping our warships armed to defend freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and our bases in the Levant armed to counter incoming missile and one-way UAV attacks.  

Furthermore, the lethality of all-domain drone technology, as well as the tactics for their deployment, has accelerated at a stunning pace.

In September we talked a lot about the use of commercial-off-the-shelf drones in Ukraine and the outsized role they are playing in strike and ISR missions.

But since we last came together, warfare has evolved dramatically once again: 

• Like in Ukraine, on 7 October we saw the effective deployment of small UAS flown from Gaza into Israel, overcoming counter UAS systems by operating without an RF signal. 

• We watched video of swarms of unmanned one-way fast attack boats in the Black Sea demonstrating devastating lethality against the Russian fleet. 

• We’ve faced the deadly effect of long-range UAVs in the Red Sea and into U.S. FOBs in the Levant. 

• And just over the weekend, U.S. forces thwarted an attempted UUV and USV attack by the Houthis. 

My point is that the pace of the threat is evolving rapidly, and our ability to respond to multiple challenges simultaneously is stretching us thin.  

We must learn from what is happening globally and adapt accordingly. Now.  

The U.S. should look to Ukraine and their extraordinary moves to rapidly build up their autonomy industry as a model to learn from.

• Already, more than 20,000 pilots have been trained and more than 20 schools established to train more pilots, manufacturers, and maintenance workers in all-domain drone warfare.

• More than 300,000 domestically produced aerial drones were manufactured in Ukraine last year alone, with an aggressive approach to onshore component production to break their reliance on the PRC for electronic components.

• Ukraine recently established the Unmanned Systems Force, and they have set an ambitious goal of manufacturing more than 1 million first-person video (FPV) drones in 2024.

• And Ukrainian’s incredible agility and ingenuity extends beyond UAS to autonomy in ground, surface, and subsurface as well – those Group 13 USV attacks in the Black Sea are keeping the Russian fleet in port in Crimea, where even there they are not safe as we saw from the swarm attacks of the last few months.

Emulating Ukraine’s proactive and agile approach could position the U.S. to stay at the forefront of military innovation in 2024 and beyond.  

So that takes us back to Replicator. Replicator is an initiative, or an idea – not a program – to help us learn how to achieve integration goals, and to focus attention on key advanced technologies, starting first with autonomous technology.

We believe in Replicator. Even more so, we believe in the goals of Replicator.   

Because let’s be clear, when we are successful, we’ll be providing our warfighters with tools that are: 

• Low cost 

• Attritable 

• Unpredictable 

• Capable of overwhelming the opponents Anti Access Area Denial (A2AD) systems 

• Maintain a low logistics footprint  

• Can be independent from bases, anywhere in the world 

• And have minimal C2 with reliance on AI and hardened cyber security  

Those are the unique capabilities that AUVSI members can provide. The future of warfare is upon us, and AUVSI and our members are working every day to ensure the U.S. is the global leader in uncrewed systems technology and autonomy.

How is AUVSI seeking to accomplish this goal? – by aligning our work through our strategic plan’s goals of advocacy, education, and connecting the industry.  

In December, we hosted a workshop at the SECRET-level at Third Fleet Headquarters in San Diego for our members and numerous DoD stakeholders – including INDOPACOM, SOCOM, NORTHCOM, DIU, CDAO, AFWERX, and many others – to discuss capability gaps and how industry can help. Serious dialogue and problem solving occurred.

Our members, and our DoD hosts, walked away with tangible outcomes. We are confident that AUVSI is the right stakeholder, given our membership and our networks, to continue to foster this collaboration between industry and the DoD. 

In two months, from April 22-25, back in San Diego for our annual trade show, XPONENTIAL, we will continue this conversation with another version of AUVSI Defense.

Further, more than a dozen of our members will be demonstrating capabilities live -- right outside the convention center in the ocean and in the air for key INDOPACOM, DIU, and other armed services stakeholders.  

Furthermore, we are investing significantly in ensuring AUVSI and our members are the tip of the spear of the advocacy discussion on Capitol Hill, in the Pentagon, and throughout the Combatant Commands on the budget, appropriations, policies, and strategies to move our industry’s technologies forward and to build the industrial base to support the level of production that is needed now, and that will be required in the immediate future.

We have added more capacity to our government affairs team, and today after just launching 5 months ago, we have more than 100 member companies participating in our Defense Advocacy Committee.  

The challenge ahead is monumental. We are clear eyed about that.

AUVSI is leading the way – and we encourage all of you to get involved with us if you are not already.

Together, we will be successful. There is no other option. Thank you.