Breaking Down The U.S. Navy’s ‘Hellscape’ In Detail
'Hellscape' is the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command's future asymmetric battlefield. What does it look like and what does it involve?
Carter Johnston 16 Jun 2024
‘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.
The concept, at its core, leverages the Department of Defense’s initiative to rapidly procure and field large amounts of unmanned systems, taking critical lessons from the ongoing War in Ukraine that has revolutionized unmanned warfare. Owing to these lessons, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks announced the Department’s Replicator initiative at the same conference in 2023. Since then, the program has been hard at work developing new capabilities.
‘Hellscape’ and ‘Replicator’ are closely related to each other and many of the capabilities set to be delivered in the Replicator program will have direct applications to the Hellscape concept envisioned by INDOPACOM. Replicator itself has sought out to deliver the exact capabilities that the Hellscape concept refers to.
What does ‘Hellscape’ involve?
“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.”
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2024/06/breaking-down-the-u-s-navys-hellscape-in-detail/
