Hellscape Taiwan: Drones, Deterrence, and the Future of Asymmetric Defense

This hellscape gauntlet, absolutely a denial strategy. It's trying to defeat the invasion. And I think if Taiwan were to make great strides and not only inquiring some of the capabilities that we laid out, but practicing them in some of their exercises and demonstrating that they're serious about this, it would give China pause. I mean, an amphibious assault is really, really hard. And I think the reason we haven't seen the Chinese undertake one is that they're not confident that they could succeed at reasonable costs. So I agree with this. I think it's a layered defense like this. By the way, I would use almost all cheap weapons because I have no faith in Chinese dams control efforts. And the vast majority of these ships are like maritime militia carrying a platoon. There'll be very few of those large amphibious landing ships involved in this. I think there'll be hundreds to low thousand vessels and we're going to need to hit them. We might as well hit them with something cheap and maybe hit them twice with something cheap. I don't really care. Welcome to the Regular Warfare Podcast. I'm your host, Ben Jipp. Today's episode does a deep dive into Dr. Stacey Pettyjohn's report, Hellscape Taiwan, which describes what a layered, drone-centric defense of the island could look like. To help us discuss and examine this updated vision for an asymmetric defense of Taiwan, we are joined by retired Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery and Dr. Stacey Pettyjohn of CNAS. The Regular Warfare Podcast is a joint production of the Empirical Studies of Conflict project out Princeton University and the Modern War Institute at West Point, dedicated to bridging the gap between scholars and practitioners to support the community of irregular warfare professionals. You can find more resources at the Irregular Warfare Initiative website at www.irregularwarfare.org. Support for the Irregular Warfare Podcast comes from members of the IW community like you and from Hadean, an AI company focused on synthetic environments for training, planning, and decision support. We hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery and Dr. Stacey Pettyjohn. All right, well, Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery, Dr. Stacey Pettyjohn, thanks for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast. It's great to have you today. It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. We are delighted to have you both on to the show. We're finally getting back to form by discussing the Indo-Pacific again. We kind of took a slight detour talking a lot about Sencom, Iran, Eastern Europe, and Ukraine. But I'm super excited to discuss Stacey's Hellscape Taiwan report because it really does provide us a vision for what a layered defense of the island in the age of prolific drone warfare could look like. I mean, it's got everything you'd want for a littoral maritime defense in depth, right? You've got an outer layer starting at like 80 kilometers away from Taiwan shore where Chinese ships would start to mass creating a target-rich environment for both air and waterborne uncrewed systems, a middle defense layer 40 kilometers away from the shore that calls for using underwater mines to canalize the invasion forces movement. Stacey, I think you had a third layer, you know, five kilometers from the shore where you basically throw the kitchen sink at the PLA. And finally, a beach or shoreline defense where you're attacking specific landing craft. And I'm sure we'll get into the specifics of all that later. But before we dive into Stacey's report, I was hoping Stacey, you could just talk about what drew you to the world of defense analysis and Taiwan. Well, I actually wrote my dissertation on the Middle East, but then at that time when I joined the RAND Corporation, we were pivoting from the Middle East to the Pacific. And so I have spent a lot of time studying sort of the defense and deterrence problems in that theater. And defense was always of interest to me, but there's sort of a high barrier of entry if you weren't in the military, which I wasn't. Point D had academic by training. It's going to a place like RAND really offered a lot of opportunities to study with a lot of experts, a lot of former military officers and to build up some expertise in that area. RAND has often been a feeder organization for the regular warfare podcast. So I'll have to shoot whoever's running that organization. Thank you. And for Mark, you've had a pretty remarkable career in the US Navy. Most flag officers have had pretty remarkable careers, but you've spent over three decades in military service. You're recognized expert on emerging technology and defense policy. Can you just give our listeners an overview of the things you're juggling in your portfolio and your interests in the Indo-Pacific? Thanks. So my portfolio at the Foundation for Defense and Demoxys, I run the cyber center there, which includes AI misuse. I do a lot of the Taiwan work along with Greg Singleton, who runs our China shop. And so we run a series of tabletops there. I go to Taiwan a lot to work with our military, the pro-bono effort we have. And then I run the Ukraine portion of our Russia center. I come to Ukraine about four times a year for two to three weeks each in a very specific training environment where we train their brigades and corps, US mission command principles to try to teach them how to do risk to force, keep their center of gravity, their manpower vote. So those are kind of the big three issues I take a look at. The reason I'm interested in PAKOM, why was the PAKOM J3? That's a good reason to get interested. I commanded a carrier strike group in the Pacific out of Japan in a destroyer squadron out of there and a bunch of ship tours out of there. So I like it and I've got pretty good relationships in Japan, Korea and Taiwan over the years. Although Taiwan, not until, except for one officer, I had no relations with Taiwan, which is something we ought to ask about during this because I consider among all the stupid things we do, our lack of senior leader engagement with the Taiwanese military, but also their whole national security complex is clinically insane. Probably something we'll get into and maybe talking about lessons learned from the Eastern front in Ukraine. I'm excited to dig into Stacey's report. So Stacey, turning to the piece amid everything happening in Europe and the Middle East, it's easy to lose focus on Asia. So what motivated you and your co-author, Molly, to write Hellscape for Taiwan at this moment? Yeah, we've had a series of projects and reports on drone warfare, starting with one that I wrote on Ukraine and then a broader one, thinking about the implications of lessons from recent conflicts for the Indo-Pacific called Swarms Over the Straits. There we were focusing on how the US, Taiwan, and China might use drones in a conflict over Taiwan. Then there was all this buzz about Admiral Paparo talking about a Hellscape for Taiwan, but was really cagey and said couldn't talk about the specific capabilities because they were classified and there was little information out there. That got me thinking about what that would entail because we concluded in our prior report that the US really needs a different class of drones than most of the ones that have gotten a lot of the attention in Ukraine. I know they've been developing longer range strike drones to reach into Russia, but most of the drones that are being used and what is pushing them towards over a million a year are the small tactical drones often just commercial quadcopters or indigenously produce variants of racing drones that are small quadcopters made from commercial components imported from China. That's not applicable for the US in a war over Taiwan, but that it's really relevant to Taiwan itself. That coupled with some of the changes we've seen in the Trump administration's policy where they seem to have become a little bit softer towards China and are really pushing allies and partners to take a larger role in their own defense. We concluded that Hellscape was really a better idea for Taiwan and to try to sketch out a point of departure concept about what that would mean in some detail and add some specificity. We went and looked at, there's been so much work on an asymmetric strategy for Taiwan. Going back to Murray's piece who first started talking about a porcupine and then Rand was doing work almost 20 years ago on this and then CSBA. We really built on the Rand study which had a four-ring strategy of asymmetric to defense and they were really focused on precision-guided missiles of various ranges that Taiwan could use. We tried to think through what you could add to that by adding drones and how they could build into this layer of defense and what sort of problems that would pose for China. The other piece that we really tried to build into that was thinking about air defenses as well. We've seen in Ukraine and Russia that the air defenses work. They're not perfect, but they're really useful and they work quite well, especially if you use them smartly and shoot and scoot, keep them hidden, you don't keep the radars on all of the time. That Taiwan would really need some mobile air defenses, which it doesn't really have right now. The patriots and their indigenously produced longer range sands that are not mobile to provide cover for their missile and drone forces and their defenders if they were to try to fight an invasion and stop it from reaching the shore. The porcupine analogy is a really interesting one. You see that thing at the Bronx Zoo and you realize it might not be that big or fast, but that would be an absolute pain to try and swallow. Stacy, you make the report that Taiwan has embraced in concept the idea of a porcupine strategy, but it has struggled to implement it in practice. Mark, as someone who's been to the island multiple times, do you agree with that assessment and where does Taiwan actually stand today in terms of readiness to deter or possibly engage with the PRC invasion? Yeah, well, thanks for having me. I've read Stacy's report. I like it, like all her stuff that she produces at NAS, like its high quality. My take is that the health scape like porcupine before are part of the overall strategic plan that Taiwan has to create under which they'll have a bunch of operational lines of effort. I think health scape will be one of them. I tend to look at it more like East Coast, West Coast. For my teenage kids, it's Tupac and Biggie, right? And on the East Coast looking out, that's health scape. We're going to need a version of what I see across the line of control in between Ukraine and Russia. And that's a whole lot of all kinds of man air and in this case, surface and undersea. And I'll tell you, like when I'm reasonably near the front, you can see 75 variants of UAS is flying at any one time. I mean, there's, I think there's 400 variants that are reasonably procuring. And this doesn't account for like individual ones made by dude and brigade and the brigades drone production battalion. They have individual drone production battalions and a percentage of the grade, probably about one third of the brigades of their hundred brigades. So they've got all these and they're basically in there modifying DJI's or in a few cases, 3D printing and then modifying drones. So you see, I agree that there's going to be this kind of dense, generally low end initially, but not all, but principally low end that's going for masks. And that's good because there's a lot of masks coming at you. By the way, I agree. I'm not going to have to have a lot of air in it because if they were to ever do a cross state invasion, which I'm not convinced they would, it's going to be accompanied by an airborne assault that makes Robert Duvall and Apocalypse now look low key, right? It's going to be several hundred simultaneous helicopters and way coming across. So they're going to need a lot of man portable, which by the way, on the crap nobody has, man portable is one of them. Mark that maybe the first time someone's integrated to Poc, Biggie and Robert Duvall into the regular warfare podcast. So congratulations on that first. So that's going west into the States. Going east is still going east looks more like Iran, US and Israel against Iran. And that's the idea that when they do this, the Chinese are going to have pushed out in an envelope around Taiwan and looking into the Western Pacific. Some number probably between since they get to pick the timing, you know, between 30 and 35 or 40 of their high end destroyers, some number of submarines in the vicinity. If they're smart to leave the aircraft carriers in port, because that would be what I would call just a target to be sunk. And then they'll be pushing out J 20s or whatever, fifth or sixth generation aircraft they have with the associated airborne control elements. And then we're going to have to try and defeat that with a mix of high and low cost weapons. So for me, you have this integrate, you know, this very, very fight in this house, it's part of it. If you lose any one of these, if you lose too fast on the hellscape, too many army guys, too many PLA get a get a short allotment, you're in trouble. If you don't roll back there, aircraft, you're in trouble. If you don't sink their ships after going back to aircraft and get US air power over the island within five to nine days, you're in trouble. I mean, I can go through each of these, but you've got to complete all these lines of effort. And this is one that's principally going to be fought by Taiwan. The West Coast is Taiwan with a little bit of America in it. The looking East is the United States with a little bit of Japan in it. And so they got to do it. One other thing I want to say is I really become frustrated with both military and civilian leadership where they say, you know, Taiwan doesn't need high end stuff. They don't need F 16s. They don't need E 2D. They don't need frigates or surface combatants. And I point out that, yes, they do. They need them in phase zero. They need them during the build up so they can keep the Chinese at a reasonable distance at problem start. And then they can use them to try to help. You know, I don't expect that any, you know, I call the two task force that Taiwanese have like metal of honor task force north and metal of honor task force south because everyone's going down, right? But the question is how much do they take out with it? How much do their submarines take out with it? How many aircraft do they have? 16s take out. And if they have things like E2Ds, they'll take out more. So I argue for both. And look, here's the beauty. They're going up to 5% defense budget. They can pay for it now. They're going to 5% on the fastest growing economy in the world, you know, year over year over year. They're going to be able to pay for what they need. So I fully support everything Stacy laid out in there. And I hope the US government's helping Taiwan develop the tactics to properly do it. I agree with most of what Mark said. I will disagree politely and tentatively at one point. I do think Taiwan, you know, doesn't need a fully asymmetric force. It needs to maintain some conventional capability for peacetime and for other missions because Hellscape, we were just looking at deterring or defeating an invasion. And that's not the full gamut of potential attacks or scenarios that they might face against China, nor all of the different ways that they want to use their military in other situations. But I think that one of the arguments I often hear is that the gray zone is a reason that they need them. And I know that they use F-16s to go out and interdict some of the Chinese aircraft that might fly close by, make sure they don't enter their airspace. I do think, and we're going to do some work on this in the future, Molly and I have on our docket to look at the gray zone. And I think it's going to become increasingly unmanned on both sides. China is seeing what Russia has done in Eastern Europe and in different places. And we've found that drones do tend to be a lot less escalatory and you can push the envelope there and people will let it go. And now that there are so many one-way attack drones, I think we're going to see them used in different ways in addition to the reusable, larger, like medium altitude and high altitude drones, because China is just making massive investments here. And I think asymmetric capabilities are the more cost-effective way to go to compete in the gray zone because you don't want to burn out your brand new F-16s just flying up all the time to meet them. On money in Taiwan, one of the reasons that we argue for the healthscape for Taiwan is that because so many of the systems are relatively affordable, what you do get, you need higher-end missiles, you need harpoons, and some of the more sophisticated weapons. One of the big lessons from Ukraine is that it's not just drones by themselves, it's been drones with artillery, drones matched with other weapons that really present dilemmas and make it difficult for your adversary to deal with. But they do provide you with some amount of volume of fires and affordable fires. But for that to happen, Taiwan is going to have to build up its own drone industry. And one of the weird things that seems to have come out of the special budget that just got passed was that they passed the part to buy American-made drones but not to make the investments in Taiwan's own drone industry, which has grown, it's still really small, but it's grown exponentially in the past few years and they've been exporting drones to Eastern Europe that have been going to Ukraine. But they need to actually have that, I think, on island and potentially work with other like-minded states and not just buy from the US or other countries because we don't have a good... We don't have a cost-effective small drone industry right now. Before we get into kind of the specifics of Stacey's report, I've always thought that you analyze the problem first from a geographic perspective. Right? Any serious military plan has got to account for geography. So Stacey and Mark, but I'll direct this at Stacey first. How does the geography of Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait shape both the problem of invasion and the logic behind the health scape concept? Geography is pretty determinative, right? It's a short distance about 100 miles between China and Taiwan, but it is still 100 miles of water that China has to pass. And amphibious assaults are incredibly difficult and complicated, and they force the attacker to mass forces and expose themselves, especially as they get closer to the shore. So that works to the defenders' favor and Taiwan's favor. And when you couple that with Taiwan's geography, there are less than two dozen potentially really good landing areas for a contested amphibious assault that narrows down the possible places that Taiwan needs to prepare defenses. In addition to their ports, which they obviously do not want to allow to be seized, and there will be aerosols, Mark is totally right about that. But that the geography helps the defender in that perspective. And then Taiwan is there are a lot of mountains and a lot of the urban areas are developed along the coast. You're in a town right next to where these beaches are. The beaches are really, really narrow, so you can hide a lot of these small mobile forces that have drones or missiles or artillery in these adjacent areas and make them very difficult to find, even if China does largely have air superiority. It would still be contested, but can fly overhead and search for them. It's still going to be a really hard problem for them to find the Taiwanese defenders if they're smart and they use camouflage, concealment and deception and use the terrain and the cities to their advantage. So it's a pretty good overview of the geography. And Mark, you already talked about the differences between the West Coast and East Coast fight. But if geography defines the problem, I feel like domestic politics plays a role in defining the solution. So Mark, could you go over what Taiwan's internal defense posture actually looks like today and its ability to implement an asymmetric strategy? I mean, look, this is a country that had 25 to 30,000 Americans in the 1960s and late 50s, 60s and early 70s. We twice intervened to help them protect themselves in the early and mid-1950s in Taiwan's states crises. And we walked away pretty clean in 1979. So we went from a country where we had a lot of embedded forces training together, working together, and we just left them cold turkey. So that's the starting point. In 1979, under a military rule, we walked away. So what's evolved is, you know, they've evolved into a dynamic vibrant democracy with political parties. The military has not evolved. It is not like in the United States where it's where meritocracy comes to roost, right? So they haven't had the same advantage yet. They're also not like, the United States is a third, one, third, one, third military, one, third navy, one, third army, one, third air force. It actually is really healthy because it keeps competition, means officers need to learn each other's skill sets, it drives jointness, pans like that, Australia's like that, the UK's like that. There's a few countries in the world that are like that. Taiwan is not. Taiwan's about a 70% army, 20% air force, 10% navy. Now the budgets don't always go that way because navy things cost a lot of money and air force things cost a lot of money. But the number of officers is like that and how they do things. So they still have a very army centric military. This is a long way of getting to, they have some real challenges. The army, the Taiwan army still refers to the West Point by the name of the West Point they had in mainland China. You know, they're still stuck a little bit in pre-1949. The other two services have evolved pretty aggressively. The problem is for the execution of Hellscape, you're going to need all three services and you're really going to need the army to be good. So Stacey, we've been talking about the Hellscape report without actually mentioning what's in it and what your vision is. So could you describe your vision for the Hellscape concept here? Because to me it sounds like layered and a drone centric defense for the island of Taiwan. But I was hoping you could kind of go in depth kind of phase by phase to describe what you and Molly envision. Sure. Because I always forget that I'm going to start with the, not one of the layers, but the overarching important supporting sort of factor, which is the mobile air defenses and having those teams moving around and creating windows of opportunity for Taiwanese drone operators to attack. And so this would be a shift in doctrine and sort of strategy on the part of Taiwan. Where right now they're planning on defending fixed sites and really trying to survive the first opening salvos of an attack. And we all know that if China launches a joint firepower campaign, the way that they write about it and that we all expect. Those missile defense systems are going to survive if they're at air bases. People who know where the radars are, they're not that mobile. So they need to move around and they need to ride out that first attack so that they then can be a force in being that episodically creates windows where they push back the Chinese fighter aircraft and drones and allow their forces to attack. So we envision four layers to the hell escape. There's the outer later, which is over the horizon attacks. And I just had someone from Taiwan asking me why we said it only goes about 80 kilometers. So about halfway across the straight. And we selected that because that's where we think that Chinese forces are going to begin to mass and concentrate. So there will be easier targets and also because it allows Taiwan to mass fires in this area. And really the hellscape is intended to be a pretty free fire zone where your Taiwan declares a maritime exclusion zone says anything that's in there. A core piece of this concept is not relying on exquisite targeting and intelligence because we don't think it's going to be available. Satellite communications are going to be jammed. So our whole concept is flood the zone. And this is where drones become useful because it is still helpful if you take out a decoy ship or a maritime militia ship that is a part of the larger flotilla that's attacking because it's going to create disturbances within their movement. It's going to create problems and you might overkill them. But if you're doing so and you're doing so with relatively cheap, you know, Shahad type drones, it doesn't really matter. So the outer layer is where you begin the disruptions. There you would also want to have you UVs under there as a part of the initial queuing. You just need intelligence on where sort of the big group of ships are. And then you send in these weapons that have seekers on them, probably radars, maybe some cameras, nothing too sophisticated. And they hit any ship like thing that they see. Once they move the outer layer into the middle layer, this is where I think it's really interesting. And you do combine some of the other principles you see in Ukraine where you try to limit the maneuver of the ships using mines. And Taiwan has really few mine laying ships. They're buying a couple more, but their mines are huge and old and require big ships to deliver them. And I think they need to get more mines that can be delivered by either multiple launch rocket systems. And or small drones. So much smaller mines that they can just proliferate in this middle later and canalize the forces. So the Chinese have to move really slow. And as they're moving really slow, they are being attacked from the air from slightly shorter range. One way attack drones as well as missiles, maybe drone bombers. You could ideally use the multi rotor copters to deliver some of the smaller mines that Taiwan would have. Because you're going to have to continue to recede. And this is where you begin to really knock the Chinese off their timetables and make it harder for them to move forward. The ships that make it through the middle later then start to approach the shore and they break visual range at about five kilometers on average. And that's where it gets really harrowing because Taiwan doesn't need to rely on off board sensors. They can just see where the ships are and these are landing craft that are not particularly well defended. They'll be well beyond their escorts and outside of the range of those air defenses. And the FV type drones come in as well as drone bombers along with short range missiles. And then you hit the beach and the same sort of problems plus even more because you want to have a ground based mines that especially are along the few exit routes. Most of the beaches only have one or two entrances or exits and that makes it pretty easy to create problems and prevent the PLA forces from getting off the beaches and to pick them off as they try to get through there. Which then means the next wave of forces can't come in. At the same time, you focus some of the bigger weapons like your missiles or your rockets at the landing craft while they're unloading, which Rand estimates takes about an hour. So it's a pretty ugly picture and I have a hard time imagining just having been on a beach recently and walking in tennis shoes that weren't wet. How terrible would be trying to run off a ship with people shooting at you and using drones to buzz your head. So that's sort of the basic concept. The density of fires increases as you get closer because you can have more of the short range weapons. They're cheap and the Taiwanese defenders are sort of hiding in different areas, pop out of a building on top, fire something, go back in and just really make it very difficult for many Chinese ships to make it through. Just to summarize then, for the audience, if you imagine essentially the island of Taiwan with multiple kind of concentric circles surrounding the island, you've got what you've called the outer layer, which starts at around 80 kilometers away from the shore. Because that's where Chinese forces would have to start to mass, which makes it easier to target 40 kilometers away from the shore. You've got what you call the muddy middle where you can start to canalize Chinese forces in a way that makes them susceptible to different fires. The final run to the shore, which is five kilometers away from the beach where you can really start to employ both drones and joint effects. And then finally, the actual landing on the beach, the combined effect of which is to create a hellscape on Taiwan for the People's Liberation Army. Did I summarize that? So you summarized it better than I did right there. And anticipating the criticisms I've heard from Taiwan, they're like, well, why don't you start shooting, have longer range fires to shoot the Chinese mainland and ships and port? And I was like, those would be great. But I think by waiting a little bit and really trying to concentrate the effects and creating this hellscape, it's sort of unrelenting pressure and this gauntlet where the Chinese forces have to run, which would really be challenging to even very experienced and well trained military. And it's not clear that PLA is either of those things. So I'd be remiss if I didn't frame the discussion a little bit for our listeners, particularly for our academics who are chomping at the bit here to talk about deterrence, right? But deterrence works by shaping an adversary's cost-benefit calculus, either through deterrence by punishment, which threatens retaliation or deterrence by denial, which convinces them their attack will fail. Is hellscape essentially a denial strategy? How confident are you that it could actually alter Beijing's calculus here? Absolutely a denial strategy. It's trying to defeat the invasion. And I think if Taiwan were to make great strides in not only inquiring some of the capabilities that we laid out, but practicing them in some of their exercises and demonstrating that they're serious about this, it would give China pause. An amphibious assault is really, really hard. And I think the reason we haven't seen the Chinese undertake one is that they're not confident that they could succeed at reasonable costs. And the stakes of attacking Taiwan are so high. It's such an important issue for China that there's no way they can accept failure. So if they were to think about how difficult it is in general and then look at this hellscape gauntlet that they would have to run or imagine running and envisioning all of the challenges associated with that, the price might just simply be too high and then certainty too great that they would decide that it's not worth going about it this way, that if they really want to force the issue, maybe they'll blockade Taiwan and try to bomb it. But those are less sure-fired ways in achieving the outcome that they really want. Ones that don't entail as significant of risk and potential humiliation. So, Mark, we just had a good conversation about deterrence and deterrence by denial. But I've got two interrelated questions for you. First, how do you view the concept outlined by Stacy? And second, and we've already been dancing around this a little bit, but what lessons should Taiwan be taking away from the Ukraine-Russia war? So first on the concept, I like it. When I was at Dzeron 15 and the Karatas Force 70, the Japan-based units, we had something called maritime counter-soft. Paritime counter-soft forces to fight off hundreds to several thousand North Korean boats or submarines or submersibles trying to come down either coast. And the same kind of layered defense, because it was with Korea, there was nine layers of defense, which any of us are, should we do 10 discussion? You're like, all right. But in summary, it was like this, although drones didn't exist at the time, so it was a much more expensive attrition with expensive weapons, although the advanced precision kill weapons systems in a slightly different variant was being used by Apache and Black Hawk Helos and that. So I'm a fan of that. And I see that weapon out here quite a bit, out here in Ukraine quite a bit. So I agree with this. I think it's a layered defense like this. By the way, I would use almost all cheap weapons because I have no faith in Chinese dams control efforts. And the vast majority of these ships are like maritime militia carrying a platoon, some merchant ship carrying a company. There'll be very few of those large amphibious landing ships involved in this. I think there'll be hundreds to low thousand vessels and we're going to need to hit them. And we might as well hit them with something cheap and maybe hit them twice for something cheap. I don't really care. But the whole idea is this low cost, attrition warfare is absolutely the right thing. And I would start out at about 80 kilometers. Why not, you know, and then start bringing them back. And if we determine that they aggregated 110 kilometers, then they get 110 kilometers. But whatever, I think that's a good starting point that Stacy and her team drew there. And you got to hit it. So from my perspective, this really describes properly how you do this here. I'm confident we've got a whammy dime weapon of one type or another that might not even cost that much, that hasn't been exposed to us all. That might be part of this. But that'll just be a part of it. What Stacy's described as the main of 80 or 90 percent solution. So what was the second question? So my second question was what lessons from Russia, Ukraine should Taiwan be paying close attention to? So the first is they have to have a production level on Island that's high. Now, it doesn't have to be high in peacetime or doesn't have to be high for them in peacetime. They could be producing for others. But they have to be able to transition to a high productivity rate when work time starts, because assuming there is some kind of lodgement, they're going to need 100,000, 200,000 drones a month, you know, kind of production very quickly, if not higher. In addition, the training of the crews, I think they'll love it. I think that they take their reserve brigades and make them heavily drone operator brigades. You'll get young kids into the reserves of sergeants, fast sergeants. And the beauty is this is one of the things you can take home and operate. I don't mean take home a drone with a weapon on it, but you know, you can VR the experience really easily. And if there's a country that could invent that VR, that training device and give it to their reservists to go train, it would be the Taiwanese. So I think that there's more to be done there to get what I see with the Ukrainians. They're drone operators, you know, they'll have an infantry brigade with significantly more drone operators in it than infantrymen. In fact, I would describe every infantry brigade that way. You know, they are, they fight differently than us. And then the other thing I see out here is the counter drone interceptors. They're going to have to get good at that. That's, by the way, that's your high end operators. Taking something else harder. The Chinese will be coming faster than the Shaheads and the Geron twos. They'll be more like the Geron threes and fives with not jet engine, but, you know, faster engines on them. And so they got to get good at it. And it's hard, but you want good operators so you can keep the cost of the weapon down. So there's a lot of training to do, a lot of acquisition to do. They're flummoxed right now because President Zeliskiy Ukraine is not excited about a public relationship with Taiwan, because he doesn't want to piss China off too much. He may be at war with China, but China is bleeding Russia dry by providing drones through third parties to Taiwan. The drones, the one way attack drones at the battalion brigade level, I'd be surprised if less than 30% weren't still based on an initial DJI drone. It used to be 90% when I was first here, then 80, then 40, I think it's probably 30. When it gets down around 10%, I think you can turn to President Xi and say, F off, I'm going to make, I'm going to make nights with Taiwan. But he's not going to do that till that number gets low enough. And this tells you a lot, by the way, about China. They're killing Ukraine with their bleeding Russia dry, where they do it. Nice country. So my next two questions were actually about kind of industrial base and the ability to scale and training. But we just covered all of that, which is fine. Because the question I'd like to pose to both of you is this, Taiwan doesn't have a ton of diplomatic friends. I mean, I think the PRC has unfortunately done a pretty good job employing statecraft to isolate the island nation from much of the world. So what can the US and other interested parties do to assist Taiwan? And I'll direct that question to Mark first. Yeah, thanks. So first, statecraft, not the word I'd use, diplomatic bullying on a like world-class scale. Yes, they're down to like the Vatican and eight countries whose names I can't remember, whose flags I don't recognize. Whenever I go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they're the flags of the countries that recognize them. And I get the Holy See. And then after that, it's just like, so yeah, they don't have them. And look, it's worse than that. It's the China's ability to convince everyone else not to sell them stuff, right? So they, you know, they can't, we're the only guys that sell them anything. The French showed them some like, in some mirages, like 30 years ago. But this, we're really ending an interesting time. And that's where you get into these direct commercial sales and things that can have two uses, commercial and military. Now, foreign countries might sniff around the edges of this and that'd be fantastic. And then there's a country like Ukraine that's like, I'm done with diplomatic bullying because I just fought four countries at once with the sporadic help from my friends, right? So they might take this a much more serious, you know, might give this opportunity. But I envision Ukrainian and maybe Israeli intellectual property being fused with a Taiwanese red free supply chain. That is China free supply chain. It fed the gas of American venture capitalism for scale. So if you bring all that together, you're going to have, that's a pretty good smorgasbord. And to me, that's how you're going to get to this. And then those Taiwan companies and joint ventures with American and Ukrainian companies, maybe Israeli companies, will begin selling to each other, to our European partners, to our other Asian partners, but with a definite production hub in Taiwan. So in wartime, it could become a Taiwan only hub when they're cut off from everybody else. I agree with a lot of what Mark said. I think there are partnerships that need to be forged. You know, Taiwan has signed some agreements with Poland and a couple of other states in Europe regarding drones, because they are dual use. And I think those type of ties need to be deepened and expanded. The only way that the world and the countries that don't see China as a friend are going to be able to wean themselves off the Chinese commercial drone market, because it is so dominant, is to work together and to put, make an aggregate demand. So Taiwan, forging those agreements with the US in particular. I mean, the US is in as bad, if not as worse of a state, despite what the infusion of money we're seeing with the Trump administration in the drone industrial base. And what I'm really concerned about is that in the US, there are so many different companies competing in competition is good. But eventually you have to pick winners or losers to scale and drive down costs and achieve economies of scale. And this is where Ukraine has struggled to a certain extent, too, compared to Russia, where the Russians have finally picked some companies and they've poured a ton of money in them and really ramped up production. And at some point, that's going to need to happen on the other side to meet an aggregate demand. I do think that the US can help by putting more Taiwanese companies on the blue UAS list if they can achieve the standards that are set there, which is a hard one, because some parts you can really only find affordably in China. But you've seen a few Thunder Tiger, a couple others that won some of the competitions recently in drone dominance, I think were Taiwanese. So more of that. And then the big thing that I think the US needs to do, which it has done very poorly, is to provide Taiwan with the capabilities that it can't produce or can't produce affordably like NASAM, Smobile Air Defenses, that no other country is going to give them some of the high end cruise missiles that there are. What? I forget how many batteries of harpoons the US has sold them and 400 missiles. But the list is long and Taiwan's backlog is extensive. And there's a zero sum game between the US and its allies and partners. And I think Taiwan has been deferred because of Ukraine, perhaps, rightly, because the need was more urgent. But now with Iran, the US is going to move up, the Gulf States are going to move up. And we can't continually be deferring them without it actually becoming a problem and weakening deterrence. So before finishing the show with implications from today's conversation, I have one more question for Stacey about her report, which focuses heavily on the maritime and littoral fight, particularly defeating the invasion at the waters edge. Maybe somewhat conspicuously, the report says less about a land campaign. So if the PLA forces do make it ashore, what should Taiwan be doing now to prepare for that sort of fight? And I'll direct that one for Stacey first. Obviously, I think there should be a extensive sort of prepared defenses put in place as much as possible, though the terrain really helps them with the mountains and the road networks being fairly limited. So the PLA, if they're going to march on Taipei, it's fairly proximate if they're using the northern beaches, but it is rough terrain and that should be prepared so that Taiwanese defenders can have the high ground and can continue to attack the Chinese as they move forward. Some form of guerrilla warfare, drones would obviously be important. And here you'd probably want to look more to lessons maybe from Nagorno-Kara-Bak and some other places that have not the same, but some similarities in how drones were used as spotters. If you combine them with artillery, where you can bring down real volume of fires and where the line of sight communications that are needed for a lot of the short range drones probably won't be as reliable because there will be lots of objects between them. But didn't go into that, you know, have to scope things down at a certain point, but you would want to be prepared because in all likelihood they might get some forces ashore. But I would be focused on preventing and being able to defeat the aerosols that would likely be coming and making sure that the commercial ports and that infrastructure is unusable so that China really does have to conduct the contested amphibious assault, which I think is much harder. And they have things like mobile pier, sort of like the mulberry pier that were used in World War II. But if you still have drones, even if they've established a bit of a lodgement, those are great targets that are going to be sitting there that you can destroy. And it would be very hard for China to reinforce the lodgement and then continually resupply it, which is the long term challenge for them in terms of once they're ashore, they still have these really tenuous lines of communication. And the resupply part is going to be difficult. It's the reserves. They've got to get, right now they have 1.2 million reserve, which is who get trained once every eight years by a lottery. I would just describe that as no reserves, right? That's like a rod and gun club with 1.2 million members and no guns, you know. So they need to trim it down to about 200,000, maybe 300,000, but I started 200,000, organize it into about 20 brigades initially of reservists. Take one or two of their active brigades and sprinkle them in. So they had the talent. Each one we get a couple hundred members into that brigade of four or five thousand of active duty and then get into a monthly training cycle, weekend to month, two to three weeks in the summer. Make sure their laws properly support people where they do that and lead their jobs and then keep them regionally anchored like the Israelis do. And then what you really want to do is bring the conscripts in over time. They have conscripts from same, who are going to settle in the same areas, come in. So like the Israelis, they get called up with their friends and they get used to the training. Over time, I'd let them, like the Israelis, take their weapons home, have this whole system where they have weapons, they have drone control units, things like that, ready to go so they can flow out and very quickly turn into the counter intervention force they're going to need. You know, whether it's going to specific sites that are laid out like Stacy did or generically going down to the coastline, whatever it is, but as a unit, they don't have any of that. They have a bad conscription plan. They have a worse reservist plan and they have an army that's not interested in fixing it because they care about the active army. And I was getting that earlier. That's one of their problems. They've got to break them. That's the last thing they got to do is get the army to understand the armies better if they're three times the size. They need to look like Israel or Finland or Estonia, not like the United States or the United Kingdom. They need to look like a country that's going to have to fight an authoritarian and a counter intervention fight, not like the world's most powerful army going to move it across the plains. So would that kind of change and really help them? So I'm hearing we need to make structural adjustments to conscription and the reserves and operationally be ready to defeat an airborne invasion, possibly self-sabotaging critical infrastructure that China would need. And then some form of guerrilla warfare. I'm going to keep that away for later. That's my word. But to finish up here, Stacey, based on today's conversation, what are some practical implications for policymakers and practitioners interested in the defense of Taiwan and stability in the Indo-Pacific? I think a lot of the implications are for the Taiwanese themselves in terms of the type of capabilities they need to acquire a doctrine that they need to develop. We put out this concept as an idea. It's a point of departure. It needs to be refined, tested and iterated. And I'm sure there are things that are wrong with it and many things that can be improved. They need to think about how it fits into their overarching strategy and how they face other challenges. But if you're on the defensive and you want to be a state that can ensure that you limit the amount of harassment you face, I think some of these principles. Of the hellscape do translate and can be useful and can be useful for controlling some of the narrow waterways, the slacks that are nearby. And then on the US side, I think a lot of this is actually following through on the sales that have been approved for Taiwan and making some new ones and then figuring out how to work with Taiwan to establish that small drone industrial base. That both nations need and make sure some of it is in Taiwan and leverages Taiwan's strengths like chips as well as the manufacturing capability that they have on island, which produces a lot of things and produces good things pretty cheaply along with the United States and other like-minded nations. And Mark, same question to you. What are some key takeaways that you'd like our audience to know? Well, first, I think it's a very good report. Make sure you read it. Thank you. I think that it is about procurement by them, it's all taken by us. It would be nice if we didn't have a $20 billion FMS backlog at the beginning of this discussion. And that's where we are now, probably 22, 23 billion. Now, I want to say something. If we're going to have them spending 5%, and we're the only person that's going to sell to them, they've been buying 4.7 billion a year over 10 years from us, about 47 billion. When you get up to 5%, they're buying like 15 billion a year. If we can't service 5 billion a year, we get a $20 billion a year backup on 5 billion a year. What's going to be like when they're buying 15 billion? I mean, irony is our senior political leadership is screaming at them to spend more. The only place they can spend it's here. They can't appreciably change their personnel costs and their domestic cost that fast. It's only the FMS. It's just this kind of paradigm. So they're going to have to buy more, they're going to have to get our FMS right. They're going to have to get the drones going right, as Stacey said. I'll throw away the thing that we didn't allude to here, but we've got to be able to go over there and talk to them about this. Key leader engagement limitations are clinically insane. There's an admiral who can sneak in from Yakuza from Japan. A soft general can come in from Hawaii once in a while. That's not engagement. Engagement is our deputy assistant secretaries flowing over and back of state, defense, commerce, whoever it is, maybe energy in some cases. But also our generals and admals going in and out. Talk about this joint training team. It's not fight club, right? But we won't talk about it. Actually, exercise. By the way, this won't work if we don't exercise. Our exercising with them is we're de-conflicted at best with them. You cannot execute Hellscape. Well, you can't execute the whole campaign de-conflicted. Pourses of Hellscape could be de-conflicted. Right now, we're like, you go left, I go right. You know, I got a son on a ship down there. I tell him, hey, there's three things I worry about for you. One, you might get hit by a PRC missile. Two, you might get hit by a US Army missile. And then three, you might get hit by a Taiwanese missile. You know, it's not good. By the way, I don't think our Air Force will hit him. I think our Air Force and Navy are pretty well de-conflicted. But we have not done this. What we have with the Japanese and Koreans, we don't have the Taiwanese. You've got to fix. These are core issues that you have to fix. So I'll go back to agreeing on, you know, getting their personnel right, getting their procurement and supply chain right and our FMS support to it. And then finally, getting that key leader engagement right. If we don't do these things so that we're exercising, working together, and we will not have the interoperability necessary to execute any, whether it's made by Admiral Akellino or Admiral Paparo or Admiral Nexdindopaycom. Well, for the policymakers listening, those are three pretty tangible takeaways, personnel, procurement and key leader engagements. And I think that's a great place to pause. So we're Admiral Mark Montgomery, Dr. Stacy Petty John. Thanks for joining us on the Irregular Warfare Podcast today. It's been great to be here. Thanks.