A naval enthusiast Web site on Sunday analyzed the US Navy’s operation “Hellscape” and what the plan to launch thousands of drones around Taiwan to deter a Chinese invasion would entail.
The concept was reported by Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin in an article published on Monday last week in which he quoted US Indo-Pacific Commander Admiral Samuel Paparo said the strategy would involve deploying thousands of uncrewed submarines, surface vessels and aerial vehicles around Taiwan to buy the nation and its partners time to assemble a response.
Paparo told Rogin about the plan on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue defense forum in Singapore.
Photo: US Navy via AP
The Naval News report, “Breaking down the US navy’s ‘Hellscape’ in detail,” said that former US commander of the Indo-Pacific Command Admiral John Aquilino first coined the term in August last year at the Emerging Technologies for Defense Conference and Exhibition in Washington.
“‘Hellscape’ envisions a battlefield filled with tens of thousands of unmanned ships, aircraft and submarines all working in tandem to engage thousands of targets across the vast span of the West Pacific,” the report said.
US Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced the Replicator initiative at the same conference, and since then, “the program has been hard at work developing new capabilities,” it said.
Many of those capabilities would have “direct applications to the Hellscape concept,” it said.
“The vision of ‘Hellscape’ is clear in the [US] Department of Defense and dozens of active programs, some under the Replicator initiatives and others independent of it, are pushing towards the bigger picture of an Indo-Pacific full of unmanned systems in a hypothetical war,” it said.
The strategy would feature uncrewed systems in every domain, including “one-way attack drones like the AeroVironment Switchblade 600 or UVison Hero-120,” Naval News reported.
“The US Marine Corps are specifically focused on loitering munitions and one-way attack drones and have issued contracts in 2021 and 2024 for integration and procurement of various unmanned systems,” it said, adding that the US Marine Corps last year “unveiled a concept of Hero-120 loitering munitions installed on a Long-Range Unmanned Surface Vessel.”
“The second role of ‘Hellscape’ could be to gather intelligence and put infrastructure in place to support a GPS and intelligence denied environment,” the report said.
Connected by satellites, high-altitude long endurance uncrewed aerial vehicles and “other aspects of ‘Project Overmatch’ that network, drones would engage large amphibious fleets crossing the Taiwan Strait from multiple vectors, coming from islands, undersea and from drone motherships far outside the first island chain,” it said.
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