Center for Maritime Strategy – Twenty months. The upper limit of time remaining for the U.S. military to make good on Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks’s commitment to field “attritable autonomous systems at scale of multiple thousands, in multiple domains” to check the PRC. Formally unveiled last August, the Replicator initiative was further defined by Hicks in September and its potential permutations within DoD have been the subject of much thoughtful commentary since (see the Brookings Institution’s assessment of what Replicator means for Army modernization). But looking ahead, the most urgent – and consequential – expression of the initiative lies with the naval service.