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It is 2029. General Secretary Xi Jinping has given the order for the People’s Liberation Army to forcibly take Taiwan. Hundreds of Chinese warships begin to cross the Taiwan strait, supported by fighter jets and protected by an umbrella of electronic jamming. 80 kilometers from Taiwan’s coast, the first blow comes from below. Autonomous underwater vehicles lurking on the seabed detonate against the hull of troop transports, scattering formations and forcing destroyers to divert to antisubmarine warfare. Moments later, hundreds of cheap kamikaze drones, interspersed with decoys and antiship cruise missiles, approach the flotilla in waves from every azimuth, forcing air defense ships to fire their interceptors at everything, depleting their limited magazines with each salvo. Drone boats race in from all directions, some ramming hulls at the waterline, others launching rockets and loitering munitions at superstructures bristling with radars and other fragile electronics.
By the time the surviving landing craft enter the mined shallows about 40 kilometers out, the carefully constructed invasion timetable is in ruins. Drone-laid minefields channel the ships into killing lanes where medium-range attack drones pick them off one by one. Loitering Taiwanese surface-to-air missiles patrol the skies above, driving Chinese aircraft into cautious standoff orbits far from the action below.
For the few ships that survive the minefields, the final five kilometers to the beach offers no reprieve. 10 final minutes exposed on open water, where Taiwanese defenders can spot them with the naked eye. As the ships close on the shore, concealed Taiwanese soldiers unleash swarms of first-person view drones that terrorize troops on the deck. Strike teams appear in windows and rooftops to fire short-range missiles and laser-guided rockets at the slow moving ships but vanish before counterbattery fire can locate them.
The Chinese troops who finally stagger onto the sand, out of sequence, missing commanders and heavy equipment, find minefields at every beach exit. Clearing a path off the beach is slow, bloody work, as Taiwanese kamikaze drones and drone bombers circle above and pick them off one by one, crushing any hope of breaking out and marching on Taipei. In our Center for a New American Security report, Hellscape for Taiwan: Rethinking Asymmetric Defense, we lay out the operational concept behind this scenario — a layered all-domain gauntlet of tens of thousands of cheap, autonomous uncrewed systems that would stop a Chinese invasion on the beaches — a Hellscape for Taiwan.
Failed Porcupine
For nearly two decades, defense analysts have urged Taiwan to adopt a “porcupine” strategy of asymmetric defense. Rather than trying to build a military to rival that of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan should turn itself into a prickly “porcupine” by deploying large numbers of cheap, mobile, and hard-to-find weapons like cruise missiles, mines, fast missile boats, and surface-to-air missiles.
Taiwan’s geography already favors the defender. Separated from mainland China by a 170-kilometer strait, Taiwan has limited landing beaches, mountainous jungle terrain, and dense urban areas. Cheap, mobile, hard to find weapons characteristic of a porcupine defense can exploit the geographic advantages far more effectively than expensive warships or jets that the People’s Liberation Army could quickly find and destroy.
Taiwan has accepted the logic of asymmetric defense in theory, but has failed to follow through in practice, with many senior military leaders still wed to sophisticated weapons and the idea of a punishing counterattacks against the Chinese homeland in the event of war. Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense continues to spend billions on prestige platforms with low survivability, such as the $16 billion indigenously developed diesel submarines, or it’s fleet of 4th generation F-16 fighter aircraft. Many of these systems have a role in peacetime deterrence and in countering gray zone activity, but they would be quickly eliminated by China’s massive missile arsenal during a shooting war. Senior officials in the Trump administration have publicly criticized Taipei’s “alarming lack of urgency in dramatically strengthening its defenses.” Taiwan’s defense spending, force structure, and operational planning remain woefully inadequate for the scale of the threat it faces in China.
Taiwan’s porcupine strategy, as currently implemented, has significant shortcomings. It relies heavily on expensive anti-ship weapons that are unlikely to be procured in sufficient numbers to counter a numerically superior People’s Liberation Army. Drones offer a compelling alternative: A cheaper strike capability that can be produced more rapidly and at greater scale. Their relative affordability also preserves budget flexibility, which is important if the Taiwanese military continues to prioritize costly legacy platforms. The deeper problem, however, is strategic: Taiwan lacks a coherent theory of victory. Without a clear operational concept that integrates its asymmetric capabilities into a unified approach to defeating an invasion, the right tools will not be enough.
Enter the Hellscape
Adm. Samuel Paparo, commander of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, first used the term “Hellscape” in 2024, describing his intent to flood the Taiwan strait with unmanned systems if China ever attempted to invade Taiwan. But Paparo’s version is an American concept that would require long-range, expensive drones launched from distant bases. Taiwan is far better positioned to employ the kind of cheap, short-range drones that have proven so effective in Ukraine. Thus, Hellscape should be a Taiwanese operational concept for self-defense embedded in its asymmetric strategy.
Four Layers of Hell
Building on previous defensive concepts laid out by the RAND Corporation and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis, our “Hellscape for Taiwan” concept organizes Taiwan’s defenses into four operational and geographical layers. Each layer compounds the damage of the last, imposing cascading attrition on the Chinese fleet and grinding the invasion to a halt at the water’s edge.
The outermost layer spans the middle of the strait, beginning roughly 113 kilometers from the Chinese mainland and 80 kilometers from Taiwan’s west coast. As the Chinese fleet enters this zone, Taiwan would flood it with long-range kamikaze drones, decoys, cruise missiles, armed drone boats, and uncrewed underwater vehicles. The goal isn’t surgical precision — It’s chaos. Because the electromagnetic spectrum will be heavily degraded, Taiwan shouldn’t depend on fragile long-range kill chains and high-fidelity targeting data to precisely strike specific Chinese ships. Instead, these weapons should be programmed to attack any ship encountered within a designated kill box, thereby sowing confusion, depleting interceptor stockpiles, and disrupting the fleet’s carefully choreographed schedule. Saturation attacks against Chinese warships would drain the finite numbers of defensive missiles onboard, leaving the fleet increasingly vulnerable to follow-on strikes as it approaches Taiwan.
To enable these long-range strikes on the Chinese fleet, Taiwanese surface-to-air missile batteries would employ shoot-and-scoot tactics to deny the Chinese air superiority over the island, selectively engaging Chinese aircraft to create operational windows during which ground teams can emerge from their hides and launch long-range drone and missile strikes without fear of attack. Hidden most of the time with their radars off, these air defense units serve as a persistent force in being, forcing China to fly in larger more cautious strike packages that limit their time over Taiwan and impair their ability to hunt for Taiwanese drone and strike teams.
The middle layer, spanning from 40 to five kilometers offshore, shifts the focus to sinking landing craft. By this point, Chinese amphibious ships would launch their smaller and more vulnerable landing craft, hovercraft and helicopters to continue towards Taiwan. Dense minefields laid by uncrewed systems, continuously reseeded to frustrate Chinese clearance effort, would channelize and slow their progression. As Chinese ships navigate deliberately through the mines, medium-range attack drones would strike them in coordinated salvos from multiple directions. Overhead, loitering surface-to-air missiles (akin to the Iranian 358 missile) would create “aerial minefields,” to intercept helicopters and force Chinese fighters to clear the airspace before they could hunt for Taiwanese forces.
In the third layer, the fight enters visual range as Chinese ships traverse the final five kilometers to the landing beaches. Taiwanese strike teams armed with first person view drones, laser-guided rockets, and short-range antiship missiles would hammer the incoming landing craft during the roughly ten minutes it takes them to cover this distance. Simple autonomous guidance, like the pixel-lock technology seen in Ukraine, would allow drones to strike their targets even if communications are severed.
The fourth and final layer is the beach itself. Chinese troops that survive the three ring gauntlet would arrive scattered, disorganized, and without critical equipment. Dense minefields at beach exits would pin them in place while attack drones, drone bombers, and direct-fire weapons exact a devastating toll. Wrecked landing craft would create additional obstacles, further choking the beach and depriving the Chinese of the sealift capacity needed for subsequent crossings.
By incorporating drones into a layered, asymmetric dense-in-depth strategy, the Hellscape concept provides Taiwan with enough cross-domain precision fires to defeat a Chinese amphibious assault at the water’s edge.
What Should Change
Taiwan’s defense rests on four interlocking imperatives: acquisition, industry, doctrine, and training. The Republic of China (Taiwan) Armed Forces should rapidly acquire hundreds of thousands of uncrewed systems, while creating an innovative ecosystem that continues to improve the capabilities through continuous iteration. Yet hardware alone is insufficient without the industrial base to rapidly produce drones.
Taiwan’s drone sector is growing, but the gap between current output of roughly 10,000 units annually and the 180,000-unit production target for 2028 remains daunting. Meanwhile, Ukraine is producing an estimated 200,000 drones a month — roughly 4.5 million in 2025. To close the gap in drone production, President Lai Ching-te should rebalance the special defense budget away from large, exquisite platforms and toward domestic drone procurement, sending a clear market signal to Taiwanese manufacturers. Simultaneously, Taiwan should build on frameworks like the recent memorandum of understanding with Poland and deepen its emerging non-China drone alliances to secure resilient, “non-red” supply chains. Taiwan’s semiconductor expertise and manufacturing flexibility make it a natural anchor for such partnerships. Taiwan has already made meaningful progress in establishing a domestic drone industry, and the relatively low complexity and cost of drone systems make this a sector where rapid scaling is achievable. In partnership with like-minded states, Taiwan has a credible opportunity to develop the production capacity required to execute a Hellscape concept.
Finally, weapons and factories mean little without the doctrine and training to employ them effectively. Taiwan should move beyond treating drones as mere surveillance tools and develop an overarching theory of victory that integrates uncrewed systems across air, sea, and land into a coherent asymmetric strategy. The Ministry of National Defense should commission a comprehensive review of drone operational concepts and release an unclassified version publicly to signal resolve to both industry and adversaries. Complementing this, regular “drone labs” that bring together frontline operators and technical experts to prototype and refine tactics would cultivate the bottom-up innovation that is fed back into industry and has proven critical in modern drone warfare.
Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense and services might continue to resist asymmetric approaches to defense, but the Lai administration is pushing hard to make this a reality, and there are reasons to believe it could succeed. Ukraine has demonstrated that asymmetric strategies centered on the use of cheap drones work in practice — this is no longer simply a theory. Drones, unlike more expensive conventional weapons, are relatively affordable and would consume a comparatively modest share of the defense budget, leaving some resources for traditional weapons. The technology is neither exotic nor overly complex, making it within the reach of a country like Taiwan to develop and produce at scale. The Hellscape concept as a part of a self-defense strategy also offers a meaningful hedge given growing concern that the United States might not intervene in a cross-strait conflict.
Yet the Hellscape concept and asymmetric strategy are designed for one particular scenario: a large scale invasion. It is appropriate for a nation to use the most challenging scenario to drive its force design and doctrinal development. But this approach is not applicable to more frequent, lower-level threats Taiwan faces and should not be mistaken for a comprehensive solution to Taiwan’s broader defense needs.
The Hellscape concept shifts the strategic calculus. The question is no longer whether Taiwan can win a conventional war against China. The question is whether Beijing can stomach the operational chaos, staggering casualties, and strategic uncertainty that an invasion would bring. By making an assault prohibitively costly and dangerously unpredictable, Taiwan can deter it from happening in the first place.
Stacie Pettyjohn, Ph.D., is senior fellow and director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security.
Molly Campbell is a research assistant in the defense program at the Center for a New American Security.
They are the authors of the Center for a New American Security report Hellscape for Taiwan: Rethinking Asymmetric Defense.
Image: 王子昌 via Wikimedia Commons
