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.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of