Admiral Samuel Paparo, who leads the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, is now facing the historic task of preventing a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as Beijing proceeds with its huge military build-up. With some 400,000 personnel and extensive naval resources under his command, Paparo intends to show credible strength by using a policy of deterrence through denial and by threatening to turn the Taiwan Strait into a drone-filled hellscape similar to the situation in modern warfare in Ukraine.
Even though the war games show that the United States and its allies will achieve a victory over an amphibious attack, the possible costs are still extremely high, particularly since other conflicts around the world are using up vital munitions. Paparo has to keep his pre-eminence and state of readiness over a huge area covering half the globe, balancing his classified capabilities with his overt deterrent in order to avoid a catastrophic great-power conflict.
The reliance which Admiral Samuel Paparo places on a defence network composed of a large number of drones is similar to the attritional denial methods used by the USS Charlotte and Ukraine's territorial defence forces. By using a large number of autonomous systems to clog the maritime approach, the object is to prevent enemy landing vessels from attaining the positional stability needed for amphibious landings.
This operational concept is based on distributed kill chains, which transfer targeting authority away from the carrier strike groups. Yet the requirement to maintain such a high level of expenditure under the constraint of simultaneous operations in multiple theatres places a strain on the logistical capacity of the regional hubs.
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