It has become conventional wisdom among the halls of the United States government that China will launch a full-scale invasion of Taiwan within the next few years. And when that happens, the US military has a relatively straightforward response in mind: Unleash hell.
Speaking to The Washington Post on the sidelines of the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual Shangri-La Dialogue in June, US Indo-Pacific Command chief Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo colorfully described the US military’s contingency plan for a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as flooding the narrow Taiwan Strait between the two countries with swarms of thousands upon thousands of drones, by land, sea, and air, to delay a Chinese attack enough for the US and its allies to muster additional military assets in the region.
“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.”
Cheap, easily weaponizable drones have transformed battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East in recent years, and the US military is rapidly adapting to this new uncrewed future. While Paparo isn’t the first to invoke the image of a robotic “hellscape” with regards to Taiwan (his predecessor, Admiral John Aquilino had previously used the term in August 2023), his comments offer the most vivid description of the Defense Department’s plan for dealing with Chinese aggression toward the US ally. In recent months, new details have started to draw out the contours of what, exactly, this “hellscape” would look like.
China has escalated its military presence, as perceived by U.S. defense authorities, in an apparent preparation to seize Taiwan, which it views as a separatist territory. According to a study by the Center for Strategic & International Studies from June, the People’s Liberation Army Navy has become the world’s largest naval force, numbering 234 battleships compared to the US’s 219; during a testimony at the Senate Armed Services Committee in March, the then-INDOPACOM commander Aquilino highlighted that the PLA Air Force has the largest number of military aircraft in the region and is on a trajectory to outpace both the U.S. and Russia.
The scope of China’s fleet of uncrewed vehicles is elusive, yet it has become the dominant force in global armed drone exports over the past ten years, a position shared only with Turkey, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Meanwhile, Chinese drone heavyweight DJI dominates the consumer drone market, which often finds its drones repurposed for combat. Despite being in what seems like a drone arms race with China, the U.S. is currently at a disadvantage.
“China has essentially replicated all large and medium-sized high-altitude drones that the U.S. developed, offering more cost-effective alternatives to models such as the MQ-9 Reaper or the [RQ-4] Global Hawk,” explains Stacie Pettyjohn from the Center for a New American Security. As the primary author of the report “Swarms Over the Strait,” she discusses drone strategies in potential conflicts over Taiwan, noting the threat posed by smaller drones that can be deployed from mainland China. China’s robust drone production capabilities suggest a significant advantage in sustained conflicts, contrasting with American and Taiwanese forces, which lack adequate drone resources to counteract a Chinese offensive, as detailed in the CNAS document.
Apart from enhancing Taiwan’s defenses against drones, the Pentagon’s “hellscape” strategy suggests that the US military compensate for this increasing disparity by manufacturing and deploying an extensive network of autonomous drone swarms. These swarms are intended to confuse enemy aircraft, assist and guide missiles for allies, undermine surface warships and landing vessels, and generally produce sufficient disorder to diminish (if not outright stop) a potential Chinese advancement across the Taiwan Strait. These networked drones will not only attack opponents but also provide vital intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance support to bridge the gaps left by satellite images and manned flights, presumably helping the US and its allies gain a more comprehensive understanding of the evolving battlefield.
A 2020 Rand Corporation study concludes that numerous interconnected, cost-effective drones could direct American long-range anti-ship missiles at a Chinese invasion fleet and would be a crucial capability for defeating China and successfully defending Taiwan. Proponents of air denial strategy believe that using “sufficiently large numbers of smaller, cheaper weapons,” including ground-based air defenses and drone swarms, “in a distributed manner” would prevent China from achieving air superiority.
As Pettyjohn explains to WIRED, the idea of Taiwan employing densely packed defenses to induce substantial losses on an invading Chinese force isn’t new, with earlier concepts of a “porcupine strategy” relying on missiles and mines as deterrents to full-scale invasion. Yet, the integration of vast drone fleets introduces an additional layer to the defense strategy. Indeed, simulations conducted by the US Air Force and think tanks like Rand in recent years have highlighted the imperative role that drone swarms could play in potentially thwarting a Taiwanese invasion.
According to the CNAS report, this strategy has been further refined following recent observations from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, where the Ukrainian military has effectively used drones against a numerically and technically superior Russian force to disrupt enemy formations, destroy armored vehicles, and even neutralize surface combatants. Notably, in the Black Sea, Ukrainian forces have managed to destroy 26 Russian vessels and pushed Moscow’s esteemed Black Sea Fleet to retreat to a distant safe harbor using missiles, kamikaze UAVs, and explosive drone boats.
The CNAS report outlines several recommendations for the Pentagon concerning the optimal use of drones to safeguard Taiwan. It stresses the importance of developing a varied collection of UAVs including both advanced, costly systems and economical, single-use drones, the advancement of autonomous drone ships for combatting large surface vessels, and the strategic positioning of short- and medium-range drones within Taiwan for an immediate reaction in the event of a Chinese assault.
The report mentions that, aside from procuring adequate long-distance drones for reconnaissance and strikes, the United States should deploy a smaller number of stealth drones capable of operating in highly contested spaces to assist in directing long-range missile strikes, proposing that inexpensive kamikaze drones with basic autonomy could potentially overwhelm Chinese naval defenses and impede an invasion fleet.
As the potential threat of invasion grows, the Pentagon is rapidly progressing its strategy for a defensive “hellscape”. In August, deputy defense secretary Kathleen Hicks unveiled the new Replicator initiative, which aims to quickly develop and deploy disposable, AI-driven drones across various domains. As of March, $1 billion has been allocated for the early production of these Replicator systems as reported by USNI News.
The effectiveness of the Replicator initiative is already evident. In May, the Pentagon announced the initial set of capabilities to be rolled out, including over 1,000 Switchblade-600 loitering munitions from AeroVironment and several unmanned interceptor surface vessels. These devices are a part of the new Prime project designed to autonomously patrol and protect maritime regions. According to a statement in January by the DOD, the first Replicator systems have been deployed to the Indo-Pacific, with some military teams already trained on these new drones.
“This is just the beginning,” Admiral Christopher Grady, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said in a May statement. “Replicator is helping us jump-start the delivery of critical capabilities at scale.”
Replicator isn’t the US military’s only effort to incorporate uncrewed weapons platforms into its formations. The Army has asked for $120.6 million as part of its fiscal-year 2025 budget request for Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance (Lasso) semiautonomous loitering munitions to outfit infantry brigade combat teams with the capability. As of April, the Marine Corps has selected three defense contractors (AeroVironment, defense upstart Anduril, and Teledyne FLIR) to compete for a potential $249 million contract to furnish Marines with so-called Organic Precision Fires-Light kamikaze drone swarms, as well as Long Range Attack Missile air-launched loitering munition. US Special Operations Command, an early adopter of loitering munitions, now wants to outfit its fleet of aircraft with air-launched systems. As for the maritime realm, the Marine Corps has been experimenting with uncrewed surface vessels bristling with Uvision Hero-120 kamikaze drone launchers, while the Navy has been eyeing missile-hauling drone boats as potential escorts for transport ships, among other lethal initiatives, following years of experimenting with uncrewed surface vessels as waterborne sensor nodes.
Beyond expanding its arsenal of uncrewed systems, the US is also working to bolster Taiwan’s own drone capabilities. In June, the State Department announced the approval of a $360 million weapons sale to Taipei that included 291 ALTIUS 600M-V kamikaze drones produced by Anduril and 720 Switchblade-300 loitering munitions. According to the CNAS report, the integration of these one-way attack drones into Taiwanese military formations, when deployed in conjunction with explosive-laden drone boats and anti-ship missiles, could potentially prevent Chinese warships from ever reaching the country’s shores in a manner akin to how Ukrainian forces have denied the Russian military control over the Black Sea.
“Taiwan needs a lot of these systems and needs them quickly to incorporate them into broader tactics and formations” as effectively as the Ukrainians have, Pettyjohn says.
And this is just the beginning: The Taiwanese government plans to procure nearly 1,000 additional AI-enabled attack drones in the next year, according to Taipei Times, with plans to expand indigenous production of homegrown capabilities to prevent backlogs in weapons transfers from the United States—and, more importantly, ease reliance on Chinese-made commercial off-the-shelf parts. (Although, as Pettyjohn points out, the Taiwanese defense community itself isn’t totally unified around the “hellscape” plan in the first place.)
Access to commercial drones “is where Taiwan is most disadvantaged” because of DJI’s relative dominance of the market, Pettyjohn says, noting that “even if Taiwan had Chinese drones available to them, they would have to hack in to each system to ensure they can’t be tracked by DJi or don’t have similar vulnerabilities.”
“Consider that for most of the first-person-view kamikaze drones used in Ukraine right now, all of those components are sourced from China,” she adds. “Even Ukraine has tried to wean itself off Chinese sources and hasn’t found anything at a comparable price point.”
Planning a “hellscape” of hundreds of thousands of drones is one thing, but actually making it a reality is another. An April 2023 assessment from the Rand Corporation indicated that rising demand for weaponized drones would likely “strain” the capacity of the existing US defense industrial base. Similarly, a separate CNAS report from June 2023 argued that the war in Ukraine (and the US government’s role as a major provider of security assistance to Kyiv) has “shed light on serious deficiencies” in the Pentagon’s ability to rapidly scale production of “key weapons” like precision-guided munitions compared to Russia—a problem echoed in the most recent CNAS report’s assessment of the US government’s approach to Taiwan’s defense.
“Ukraine consistently has pioneered new approaches to drone warfare, but Russia has rapidly adapted and scaled drone production in a way that Ukraine cannot match,” the June 2024 CNAS report says. “Technological and tactical innovations are necessary but not sufficient. Mass production of an affordable mix of drones is also needed to support a large and likely protracted conflict.”
The report adds that the US defense industrial base may not be “currently capable of producing the quantities of drones needed for a war with China.”
Like Russia, China’s autocratic regime has enabled the country’s defense industrial base to rapidly accelerate weapons R&D and production, so much so that Beijing is “heavily investing in munitions and acquiring high-end weapons systems and equipment five to six times faster than the United States,” as a March comparison from CSIS put it. By contrast, the US defense industrial ecosystem has over the past several decades consolidated into a handful of large “prime” contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, a development that threatens to not only stifle innovation but hamstring the production of critical systems needed for the next big war.
“Overall, the US defense industrial ecosystem lacks the capacity, responsiveness, flexibility, and surge capability to meet the US military’s production and war-fighting needs,” the CSIS report says. “Unless there are urgent changes, the United States risks weakening deterrence and undermining its war-fighting capabilities.”
To that end, the latest CNAS report recommends that the Pentagon and Congress work to foster both the commercial and military drone industrial base “to scale production and create surge capacity” to quickly replace drones lost in a future conflict. While the Pentagon has, with regards to Ukraine, relied on multi-year and large-lot procurement programs to source munitions from large “primes” and “[provide] industry with the stability it needs to expand production capacity,” as the 2023 CNAS report put it, the Replicator initiative is explicitly designed to not only further provide that stability to drone makers but also to pull in “nontraditional” defense industry players—startups like Anduril or drone boat maker Saronic, the latter of which recently received $175 million in Series B funding to scale up its manufacturing capacity.
Replicator “provides the commercial sector with a demand signal that allows companies to make investments in building capacity, strengthening both the supply chain and the industrial base,” according to the Defense Innovation Unit, the Pentagon organ responsible for capitalizing on emerging commercial technologies. “Replicator investments incentivize traditional and non-traditional industry players to deliver record volumes of all domain attritable autonomous systems in line with the ambitious schedule set forth by the deputy secretary of defense.”
“It comes down to contracts,” Pettyjohn says. “Where Replicator is potentially most impactful is where the Pentagon buys something they keep for a few years before they get something new for a different mission set so the DOD isn’t keeping a system in their inventory for decades. Establishing those practices, getting those contracts out there, and getting enough money into it so there’s competition and resiliency within industry is really needed to fuel innovation and provide the capabilities that are needed.”
It’s unclear whether the United States will actually be ready to defend Taiwan when the moment arrives; as legendary Prussian military commander Helmuth von Moltke is famously quoted as saying, “no plan survives first contact with the enemy.” But with the right preparation, funding, and training (and a little luck), the Pentagon and its Taiwanese partners may end up successfully throwing a wrench in China’s suspected invasion plans by flooding the zone with lethal drones. War is hell, but when the next big conflict in the Indo-Pacific rolls around, the US wants to guarantee that it will be an absolute hellscape—for the Chinese military, at least.
