US Has A Nasty Surprise For China If It Tries To Invade Taiwan — Hellscape

The United States has a surprise up its sleeve in the event of China crossing the Taiwan Straits and invading Taiwan.

According to the US Navy’s new head of Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Samuel Paparo, the new strategy is dubbed “Hellscape.”

The strategy assumes that China, learning from the Russian stalemate in the Ukraine war, will launch a massed drone and missile attack to overwhelm Taiwan with little warning.

In this scenario, when the Chinese invasion fleet moves out from its ports to sail towards Taiwan, to cross the 100-mile (160-kilometre) wide Taiwan Straits, the US military will flood the waterway with thousands of swarm unmanned underwater and surface vessels (UUVs and USVs), apart from kamikaze drones and loitering munitions.

“I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities so that I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything,” the Admiral said.

“I can’t tell you what’s in it, but it’s real and it’s deliverable,” the Admiral further added.

These UUVs, USVs, and loitering munitions, the US hopes, will flood the Taiwan Straits and make life hell for the invading Chinese fleet, just like what the Ukrainians have done to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.

The US strategy is likely to be an upgraded version of this Ukrainian strategy, which will involve a lot of artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect, identify, and harass the Chinese ships crossing the straits.

This will give the US and its allies — Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and potentially even India — enough time to mount a response.

The US has already started to work on it. The US Department of Defense (DoD) has given a billion dollars to a program called "Replicator." This program will build swarms of thousands of UUVs, USVs, and loitering munitions, again something that Ukraine has demonstrated, albeit on a smaller scale.

Admiral Paparo believes that the West’s four-decade effort to convince China to behave and change has failed and is now giving way to a more dangerous era in Asia.

He says, “The region has got two choices. The first is that they can submit, and as an end result give up some of their freedoms… or they can arm to the teeth.”

“Both cases have direct implications for the security, the freedom, and the well-being of the citizens of the United States of America,” Paparo adds.