INDOPACOM's Most Likely COA contra the PRC? I think it is called, "COA-Lotus"

"Hellscape" is to operational planning what "manscaping" is to masculinity

How many times will Charlie Brown let Lucy hold the football for him to kick?

How long will we allow military professionals to benchmark marketing over sound military planning?

How many times will we let the Cult of Tomorrowland whisper sweet nothings into our ear while serving up a bowl of lotus stew?

Here is a rather simple fact: inside the procurement system we have - including kludge workarounds like DEPSECDEF Hicks’s “Replicator” - if you believe that the window of greatest vulnerability for war with the People’s Republic of China is 2027 to 2032, which after initial skepticism I have grown to think is correct, then we will go to war with what we have now.

As such, you need to look at what those charged with stewardship of our defense are doing NOW to maximize production of what is a known capability NOW. Not PPT thick, not aspirational, not “sounds sexy.” No. Is ready to go now. Yes, continue to develop and experiment, but that is not the primary effort.

We have consumed the last quarter-century of “time” daydreaming through transformationalism and peacocking our arrogance over previous generations to create “game-changing” offsets in the “out-years.” We have gone through so many “offsets” and “revolutions in military affairs” that I have lost count … none to any meaningful effect.

I am not alone in seeing the present from the perspective of standing on the dung-heap of the promises, spin, hype, and overpromising of the last quarter-century. The breathless hype doesn’t work anymore. No one believes it…and yet:

‘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. Admiral John Aquilino, former commander of the Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM), originally coined the term in August 2023 at the Emerging Technologies for Defense Conference and Exhibition.

Show me:

• C2 and communications bandwidth requirements of this compared to existing assets, predicted assets by 2030

• Adjust the first point above in a hostile EW environment

• Adjust further by the impact of access denial to LEO satellite VOX & data

• Show me the manufacturing of said units, in scale, absent and components, etc sourced from the PRC

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

Admiral Samuel Paparo,

• Show me how that is funded in the present POM - in volume to make a substantial impact in the expected scale of a PRC invasion?

• What FY, given the expected funding of programs of record, do you expect to have the units in place to give you D+30 of wiggle-room?

• How many days warning do you need prior to PRC action in the Taiwan Strait to have your units by the FY in the answer above to create this “hellscape?”

• What actions do you believe the PRC will take to mitigate your “hellscape?”

• What are your planning assumptions for the “hellscape” to perform as desired, and if it does not, what are your branch plans?

INDOPACOM’s ‘Hellscape’ concept will feature unmanned systems in every domain. From High-Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) UAVs like the U.S. Navy’s MQ-4C Triton maritime patrol aircraft, down to one-way attack unmanned surface vessels (USVs) like the Muskie M18 developed by MARTAC.

• The Triton is the USN’s RQ-4 Global Hawk. It was supposed to be the “Broad Area Maritime Surveillance” partner of the P-8A Poseidon - not unlike the pointy-nosed “loyal wingman” concept. The CONOPS could never join the real world from the PPT, and the initial buy of 68 was whittled down to today’s couple of dozen or so, of which only 12 will be operational. I’ll let you do the math - and eye-rolling - from here.

• The M18 Muskie?

That, my friends, is a small bay boat. I fish out of a slightly larger version of this, and it gets sporty in the Intracoastal Waterway any time the wind gets higher than 15 knots.

Given the numbers of targets and weather in the Strait of Taiwan, how many of these can MARTAC source from Sea Fox, Boston Whaler or wherever they’re being made, and ship to Taiwan? By what year? Who has C2 of them? Where will they be stationed? How many US personnel are needed to be in place to run them? See C2/comms question up-post as well.

Again, numbers available and onstation to buy us the D+30 zone of zen, please?

I have not seen such a rage-inducing set of fragile planning assumptions, piss-poor critical vulnerability analysis, and layered optimism filters in the below paragraph since we were told that the Littoral Combat Ship would dominate combat in the littorals like the Red Sea.

Connected by satellite, HALE UAVs, 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. One-way attack drones would be used to deplete large amounts of surface-to-air missiles carried by fleet escorts, while submarines launch UUVs to silently monitor waters hundreds of miles away. Attritable intelligence gathering USVs, UUVs, and UAVs would also operate on the front lines, dispersed across hundreds of miles to maximize coverage, giving allied forces a single, fused image of the battlespace with the help of ‘Project Overmatch’.

I don’t need to go in the SCIF to wargame this. This is absolutely aspirational delusion at the highest level.

Is this true?

Exact details of how this would look in a real wartime scenario remain classified.

“I can’t tell you what’s in it. But it’s real and it’s deliverable.”

Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander, INDOPACOM in an interview with the Washington Post

Sure it is. Most of those who spent a career in the military have been read into “war-winning” capabilities that…even after you are read in, you quickly realize they are not that “war-winning” as they’re being sold. Nice and helpful? Yes. Replacing the hard work of time, mass, and killing?

No.

Carefully shaped inside a delicate framework of planning assumptions and kind critical vulnerability analysis? Almost always.

In a time where there is a consistent drumbeat of happy-talk and over-promising, such hype doesn’t just create cynicism, it requires it.

‘Hellscape’ is by no means the only plan the U.S. has in response to a potential invasion of Taiwan. Officially, the United States does not make a clear-cut policy in regards to this matter. But in the event that the United States does move to defend Taiwan from an invasion, ‘Hellscape’ will only be the first of many parts of a much larger plan.

This is the one glimpse of truth here. Especially with large UUV being involved in such things as MIW and reconnaissance, the individual parts of ‘Hellscape’ will be nice to have … but the overselling here isn’t just embarrassing, it is dangerous as hell.

Why is Russia’s 3-day to 3-week war already into its 3rd year? Russia’s national command authority was told what it wanted to be told, not what it needed to be told.

It isn’t just that what is promised by ‘Hellscape’ is unproven technology, unfunded, and much less ready for operational testing … it is that it is being sold as if it is and can be manufactured in tactically effective numbers.

What is not being done instead but should be is maximizing production, readiness, and sustainability of those systems that are proven, funded, and operationally proven that will be ready to sail west of the International Date Line to secure the self-determination of the Taiwanese people, the sea lanes to Japan, the world’s primary production center of microchips that modern society depends on, and most importantly - the international order that is underwritten by the US military that in turn enables our primary position on the world stage - that by itself allows our economy to maintain the standard of living expected by the American people.

You want to keep the PRC on the mainland? Like the US dollar being the world’s reserve currency?

By cynical. Ask hard questions. Demand accountability.