Swarming drone ‘hellscape’ to deter PRC use of force against Taiwan
FORUM Staff
A key to maintaining a Free and Open Indo-Pacific involves thousands of armed drones providing a swarming “hellscape” to deter Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping from ordering the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to cross the Taiwan Strait and invade self-governed Taiwan.
United States Navy Adm. Samuel Paparo, Commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM), recently said the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants “to offer the world a short, sharp war so that it is a fait accompli before the world can get their act together.”
“My job is to ensure that between now and 2027 and beyond, the U.S. military and the Allies are capable of prevailing,” Paparo told The Washington Post newspaper.
U.S. Department of Defense officials believe Xi wants the PLA ready by 2027 to invade Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its territory and threatens to annex by force. To avoid a war of attrition — a lesson learned from Russia’s botched invasion of Ukraine in 2022 — the PLA likely would try to overwhelm the island with a massive attack with little warning.
In response, the U.S. and its Allies and Partners likely would deploy thousands of uncrewed aerial drones, submarines and surface ships to slow an invading force while preparing to mount a full response, the newspaper reported.
“I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities,” Paparo said. “So that I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything.”
Paparo’s predecessor at USINDOPACOM, U.S. Navy Adm. John Aquilino, discussed the strategy at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies for Defense conference in August 2023 in Washington, D.C.
“The components in [USINDOPACOM] have been experimenting for the past five [to] 10 years with many of those unmanned capabilities. Those will be an asymmetric advantage,” Aquilino said. “So operational concepts that we’re working through are going to help amplify our advantages in this theater. There is a term — ‘hellscape’ — that we use.”
Aquilino said one goal is the ability to hit 1,000 targets in 24 hours, according to reports.
At the same conference, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks unveiled the Replicator initiative focusing on fielding thousands of autonomous systems across multiple domains. It seeks to counter the PRC’s rapid military buildup and prioritizes fielding relatively inexpensive uncrewed platforms, allowing commanders to tolerate a higher degree of risk in employing the assets.
In May 2024, Hicks announced that the first Replicator systems were delivered to warfighters.
Ukraine has used a similar drone strategy since Russia’s illegal invasion, including weaponizing disposable, commercial aerial drones to deploy against enemy formations and using maritime surface drones to attack Russian ships in the Black Sea. The PLA would be equally vulnerable if it tried to attack Taiwan because the required large-scale amphibious invasion would expose Chinese troop transports to massive drone attacks capable of overwhelming PLA countermeasures.
“I think [hellscape] is creating a chaotic, unpredictable situation in the Taiwan Strait using unmanned systems — mostly surface systems, but maybe also some undersea systems and ones that are relatively inexpensive,” Bryan Clark, director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the U.S.-based Hudson Institute, told the publication Aviation Week in September 2023. “They’re taking the cue . . . from what the Ukrainians have done and [asking], ‘Can we apply that model in the Taiwan Strait?’ Because you’ve got a similar, kind of, fish-in-a-barrel sort of opportunity.”
