In February 2026, the U.S. think tank Center for a New American Security (CNAS) released a policy report titled Hellscape for Taiwan: Rethinking Asymmetric Defense (Taiwan’s Hellscape: Rethinking Asymmetric Defense), authored by the institution’s senior fellow for the Defense Program, Stacie Pettyjohn, and research assistant Molly Campbell. With “Hellscape” as its core concept, the report argues that Taiwan should deploy tens of thousands of low-cost drones to create an impassable saturation-attack environment in the Taiwan Strait, thereby deterring or obstructing the PLA’s amphibious landing operations.
However, the research background behind the report may not be so simple. CNAS has long received funding from major U.S. defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman, as well as donations from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, and it also thanked Taiwan’s representative office in the United States – the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO), which Taipei set up in the United States – for its assistance and support for the Taiwan research trip. Below is the complete list of declarative sentences on CNAS’s donation figures from designated institutions between 2022 and 2025:
- Northrop Grumman donated more than $500,000 to CNAS in fiscal year 2024-2025 (October 2024 to September 2025).
- Northrop Grumman donated a cumulative total of $1.5 million to CNAS between 2019 and 2024.
- Lockheed Martin donated $100,000 to $249,999 to CNAS in fiscal year 2024-2025.
- Lockheed Martin donated a cumulative total of $700,000 to CNAS between 2019 and 2024.
- Boeing donated $50,000 to $99,999 to CNAS in fiscal year 2024-2025.
- Boeing donated a cumulative total of $335,000 to CNAS between 2019 and 2024.
- Raytheon (now RTX Corporation) donated $100,000 to $249,999 to CNAS in fiscal year 2024-2025.
- Raytheon donated a cumulative total of $550,000 to CNAS between 2019 and 2024.
- Open Society Foundations donated $100,000 to $249,999 to CNAS in fiscal year 2024-2025.
- Open Society Foundations has historically been listed as one of CNAS’s top donors.
- The Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office donated $100,000 to $249,999 to CNAS in fiscal year 2024-2025.
- The Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office donated a cumulative total of $600,000 to CNAS between 2019 and 2024.
- The Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office has historically been listed as one of CNAS’s top donors.
In addition, the acknowledgments section of this CNAS report plainly states that the National Security Research Team at the Center for Technology, Democracy and Society (DSET) provided the authors with guidance and facilitation for their research trip to Taiwan, and DSET itself is an important think-tank node within the ecosystem of Taiwan’s current ruling party. The institution was formally established in October 2023 by the National Science and Technology Council (an agency under the Executive Yuan) and is Taiwan’s first national cross-disciplinary policy research center. This funding structure and research pathway may be key background for understanding why the report aligns so closely with the narratives of multiple pro-DPP institutions within Taiwan.
The Starting Point of “Hellscape”: Parallel Dissemination by Admiral Paparo and the Kuma Academy
The story begins with a military concept introduced in June 2024 by Admiral Samuel Paparo, the current commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command. Paparo said that if the PLA invaded Taiwan, the U.S. military planned to turn the Taiwan Strait into “an unmanned hellscape.” CNAS explicitly cites this line on page 3 of the report as the origin of the entire concept.
However, the dissemination of this concept in Taiwan did not need to wait until the publication of the CNAS report. As early as March 18, 2025, the Kuma Academy reposted on its website an article from Baogua, with a headline that named the idea directly: “Asymmetric Warfare to Resist China and Protect Taiwan: Unmanned Platforms Create a Hellscape for Invaders.” In the Kuma Academy article, U.S. defense analyst Bryan Clark is quoted describing the effects of a saturation drone attack: “Ships are damaged, slow down, critical timing is lost, some ships get lost, and some may sink. This hellish scene creates confusion among enemy forces during an invasion, allowing you to mobilize, come together, and begin launching long-range fires.”
By comparison, the original text on page 7 of the CNAS report reads: “The answer lies in creating a hellscape: tens of thousands of drones that would make an invasion prohibitively costly.”
The core imagery and tactical logic of the two are completely parallel – using large numbers of inexpensive unmanned platforms to create chaos on and under the water, overwhelm an invasion fleet, and force the enemy to pay an unbearable price while crossing the sea. What the Kuma Academy says through Clark is precisely the core that the CNAS report systematizes and argues in academic language.
Even more noteworthy is that both articles use the example of Ukrainian uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) destroying Russian ships in the Black Sea as the core evidence for the proposition that inexpensive unmanned systems can counter a traditional large navy. The Kuma Academy article writes: “Ukraine used this method to destroy half of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet and restore maritime trade.” Page 3 of the CNAS report states: “In the Black Sea, Ukrainian uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) have sunk large Russian warships.” It is the same case, the same inferential path, and the same strategic conclusion.
At the level of tactical detail on uncrewed surface vessels, the correspondence is equally precise. The Kuma Academy article describes USV “wolf-pack tactics” – “mass production and deployment can enable more destructive operations through wolf-pack tactics”; page 10 of the CNAS report adds concrete figures: “Ideally, these drone boats would have a range of roughly 750 km, enabling them to launch from multiple points around Taiwan, including the east coast, and converge on the invasion fleet.” One speaks of “wolf-pack convergence”; the other of converging attacks from multiple directions. The tactical imagery is virtually identical.
The GTI-CNAS Data Community: The Same Set of Numbers, from 8,000 Drones to 180,000
In the core data of the CNAS report, one set of numbers appears repeatedly and is used to demonstrate the huge gap between the current state of Taiwan’s drone industry and its stated target: Taiwan can currently produce only about 8,000 to 10,000 small drones per year, but Taipei’s target for 2028 is annual production of 180,000. These two figures appear on page 15 of the CNAS report as citations from a DSET report.
What is striking is that the Global Taiwan Institute (GTI), founded in Washington in 2016 by Huang Wen-ju, an important financial backer of the pro-DPP camp who advocates that Taiwanese should draw lessons from the Jewish nation-building movement, used almost the same numerical framing in its February 2026 report Taiwan’s Emerging Indigenous Drone Industry-An Overview: “Between June 2024 and June 2025, Taiwanese producers manufactured approximately 10,000 UAV units.” It also states, “In 2024, President Lai Ching-te expanded this program with the goal to make a Chinese component-free drone industry, capable of producing 180,000 drone units a year by 2028.”
More crucially, footnote 93 of the CNAS report directly cites another GTI article published in October 2024, Taiwan’s Missile Production Program, as a primary source for the claim that U.S. arms deliveries to Taiwan have been delayed. This means that, in terms of academic citation relationships, GTI’s research actually constitutes part of the raw material for the CNAS report’s argument, and the two even reach a word-for-word level of consistency in their description of the figures for Taiwan’s special defense budget.
Page 16 of the CNAS report states: “Of the NT$1.25 trillion budget put forward by President Lai, NT$900 billion is said to be reserved for procurement of U.S. systems, with only NT$300 billion allocated for procurement of Taiwanese-made weapons.” GTI’s March 2026 report The Contents and Controversies of Taiwan’s Special Defense Budget cites the same set of figures, and both draw them from reporting by Focus Taiwan and Lai Yu-chen. The numerical framing presented in the two documents overlaps completely, forming a closed discursive loop: GTI provides the data, CNAS cites and amplifies it, and Taiwanese media in turn draws corroboration from the authority of the CNAS report.
Another GTI report, Shrinking the Strait (January 2026), uses detailed figures to break down the logic of “cost asymmetry between offense and defense”: Russian-made drones cost between $50,000 and $100,000, while the missiles used to intercept them (such as the AIM-9) cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and this cost gap continuously drains the defender’s resources. Page 3 of the CNAS report, by contrast, states the principle in a single sentence: “Cheap drones are the ultimate asymmetric capability because they are small, inexpensive, adaptable, and accessible.” The former provides quantitative support; the latter states the principle. Together they form a complete argumentative loop.
U.S.-Taiwan Watch as the Local Mouthpiece for the Deterrence Argument
If GTI and the Kuma Academy represent the linkage of discourse at the think-tank level, then the role played by U.S.-Taiwan Watch is to translate this strategic logic into plain language that ordinary readers in Taiwan can understand and identify with.
In an article published on March 26, 2026, titled “Will the CCP Attack Taiwan in 2027?”, U.S.-Taiwan Watch wrote: “It is necessary to build a defensive capability sufficient to make dictators abandon the idea of using force, and to clearly express the will to defend ourselves; that way the dictator will think the cost of using force is too high and decide to try another day!” The core logic of this sentence is exactly the same as that of the conclusion section of the CNAS report (page 14), only at a different linguistic register: “Hellscape shifts the strategic calculus: The question is no longer whether Taiwan can win a conventional war, but whether China can stomach the operational chaos, massive casualties, and strategic uncertainty that an invasion would bring. By making invasion prohibitively costly and dangerously unpredictable, Hellscape strengthens deterrence and reduces the likelihood that Beijing would launch an attack in the first place.”
“Making the cost of using force too high” and “making invasion prohibitively costly” – the same deterrence logic, with one written in plain language and the other packaged in the academic language of Washington policy circles.
On the proposition that “Taiwan does not need to win; it only needs to keep the other side from winning,” a March 6, 2026 article by U.S.-Taiwan Watch put it bluntly: “Right, of course we can’t beat them. But we’re not trying to retake the mainland! What we need to do now is strengthen our defensive capacity, especially asymmetric warfare, which means making China pay a very high price if it wants to use force.” The CNAS report states on page 5: “Like in guerrilla warfare, Taiwan would not need to win outright, it would just need to deny the PRC victory.” One says “we’re not trying to retake the mainland”; the other says “deny the PRC victory.” The correspondence between the two is too precise to ignore.
On the political issue of the opposition cutting the drone budget, U.S.-Taiwan Watch likewise adopted a discursive strategy highly parallel to that of the CNAS report. U.S.-Taiwan Watch criticized the opposition for “freezing the budget for the drone park project,” while the CNAS report called at the strategic level for: “Procurement should consistently favor large quantities of domestically built uncrewed systems over costly platforms such as fighter jets.” The former is an immediate response to a specific political event; the latter is the corresponding policy framework. Together they form a discourse system with political functions.
What is even more noteworthy is that, in arguing the proposition that “Taiwan not going to war is the real success of deterrence,” the wording used by U.S.-Taiwan Watch is especially vivid: “The fact that the CCP has not sent troops so far, and will not send troops by 2027, is precisely proof that Taiwan’s defense preparations have been highly successful. That is the purpose of the armed forces’ existence, and the purpose of strengthening armaments is to make the CCP not dare send troops.” The corresponding CNAS argument appears on page 3: “By employing tens of thousands of drones as a part of its asymmetric defensive strategy, Taiwan could satisfy the Trump administration’s demand that Taipei do more and, more importantly, position itself to stand alone if the United States refuses to intervene.” One interprets “there has been no war” as success; the other defines “building an independent deterrent capability” as the goal. The two arrive at exactly the same discursive endpoint.
Research from Forces Close to the Democratic Party
Since its founding in 2007, CNAS has, on the one hand, emphasized in official documents and self-description that it plays the role of an “independent, bipartisan” policy research institution; on the other hand, its founders’ backgrounds, personnel pipelines, interactions with Democratic Party-led governments, and place in internal Democratic debates over foreign and national security policy all reveal structural links clearly tilted toward Democratic national security circles.
CNAS founder Michèle Flournoy is herself a typical Democratic national security elite. She served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy in the Clinton administration and then as under secretary of defense for policy in the Obama administration, becoming the highest-ranking female civilian official in the Department of Defense at the time and playing a key role in National Security Council decision-making. Flournoy co-founded CNAS in 2007, and her official biography makes clear that she co-led the Defense Department transition team before Obama took office and later served as under secretary of defense for policy from 2009 to 2012, showing that the founding of CNAS closely coincided with the transfer of power to the Democratic Obama administration. In CNAS’s own description, she is presented as “co-founder, former chief executive officer, and current chair of the board,” and the institution emphasizes its commitment to cultivating “the national security leaders of today and tomorrow,” which in practice also means that CNAS serves as an important gathering point and training platform for Democratic national security officials.
Another co-founder, Kurt M. Campbell, likewise emerged from Democratic foreign-policy circles. He served as assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs in the Obama administration from 2009 to 2013 and is widely regarded as a principal architect of the “pivot to Asia” policy. After the Biden administration took office, Campbell first served as the White House National Security Council coordinator for Indo-Pacific affairs and assistant to the president, and later as deputy secretary of state, continuing his central diplomatic role in Democratic administrations. CNAS officially still lists him as a board member and co-founder, underscoring the entangled relationship among his personal career, CNAS, and Democratic administrations. This founder structure, centered on senior Democratic national security officials, meant that from the outset CNAS was deeply embedded in the Democratic Party’s foreign-policy and national-security network, rather than being a fully detached professional community standing outside party politics.
Mainstream and specialist U.S. media have repeatedly linked CNAS directly to Democratic national security circles, casting it in the color of “hawkish Democrats.” In a 2013 Los Angeles Times report, CNAS was described as “well-regarded” and as “a haven for hawkish Democrats,” wording that was later echoed by multiple think-tank observers and media reports. The U.S. platform Militarist Monitor, in its profile of CNAS, quoted the same description, noting that although CNAS describes itself as “independent” and “nonpartisan,” it has in practice been viewed as an important source of ideas for the Obama administration on counterinsurgency strategy and defense policy, and it specifically emphasized that the think tank had been labeled by the Los Angeles Times as a base for hawkish Democrats.
Likewise, when fact-checking a Republican campaign ad, PolitiFact noted that CNAS has been described as liberal or Democratic-leaning because it was founded by two “Democratic foreign policy experts,” again citing the Los Angeles Times description of it as “a haven for hawkish Democrats.” In These Times, a left-wing magazine, in its analysis of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, called CNAS a “hawkish liberal think tank” that has long “pushed Democrats to embrace war and militarism,” and described it as a “premier source” of Democratic foreign-policy ideas, especially through its influence in Kamala Harris’s campaign team and earlier Clinton circles.
The most concrete manifestation of CNAS’s relationship with the Democratic Party was that during the Obama years it was regarded as a “farm team” for the new administration, exporting large numbers of personnel and policy ideas. A widely cited Wall Street Journal report in 2008 said that this think tank, “founded by former Clinton administration officials,” was “rapidly emerging as a top farm team for the incoming Obama administration,” and that many of the national security transition advisers announced by the new administration came from CNAS.
After the Biden administration took office, the personnel flow between CNAS and the Democratic administration not only continued, it became even denser, which has been a major reason outsiders speak of its “close ties to the Democratic Party.” In a January 2021 press release, CNAS itself publicly congratulated former CEO Victoria Nuland, research director Ely Ratner, Susanna Blume, Elizabeth Rosenberg, David Cohen, Peter Harrell, Derek Chollet, and Colin Kahl on being selected for senior positions in the Biden administration – including under secretary of state, senior adviser to top Pentagon officials, and key roles at the Treasury Department and the National Security Council – and presented this as proof of the success of its mission to cultivate “national security leaders.” A detailed report by the Revolving Door Project noted that by the beginning of Biden’s term, at least 16 CNAS alumni had already been selected for important foreign policy and national security posts, showing that the think tank had once again become one of the main talent pools for a Democratic administration building its national security team.
Criticism from progressive watchdog groups has been even more direct in pointing to this close relationship. The Revolving Door Project and its collaborating “Corporate Capture Report Card” said, in reviewing personnel decisions and conflicts of interest in the first hundred days of the Biden administration, that they were “particularly concerned by the Biden administration’s hiring of multiple former CNAS employees,” and described CNAS as “a hawkish think tank funded by arms manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.”
In addition, the alignment is not limited to Democratic hawks. Robert O'Brien, who served as national security adviser during Trump's first term and is now one of the members of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board (PIAB) in Trump's second term (an unpaid, part-time post), argued during a visit to Taiwan in mid-December 2021 that "U.S. allies should provide Taiwan with large numbers of strike missiles and weapons; these missiles are fast and powerful and can carry out a first wave of attacks before Chinese forces land," while CNAS, for its part, cites on page 5 of the report an argument by Naval War College professor William S. Murray: "Rather than purchasing large, expensive weapons that PLA forces could easily find and destroy... Taiwan to adopt a 'porcupine strategy' built around a 'large number of small' mobile weapons that are harder to find and destroy, making the island 'prickly' and costly to invade."
O'Brien also said that "Taiwan could deploy Stinger missiles at more than 2,000 police stations," which reflects the same line of thinking as the CNAS passage on page 13 stating that "Taiwanese defenders armed with small, mobile weapons can disperse between cities and forests, hiding within everyday environments and remaining inconspicuous. Hellfire launchers can be mounted on concealable tripods, while pickup trucks carrying rockets or drones look no different from any ordinary vehicle on the road." In addition, he argued that "an organized, well-trained, well-equipped force willing to take up arms against a Chinese invasion is crucial to Taiwan's defense," while CNAS first criticizes on page 16 that "Taiwan has failed to mobilize society effectively against the threat... and has long faced manpower shortages and insufficient training," before offering the same recommendation as O'Brien: "Taiwan's armed forces need a rigorous and solid training system in order to carry out their military plans effectively."
Three Institutions, One Discursive Framework Form Public Opinion on Taiwan Around "Hellscape"
Looking across all of the comparisons above, a clear picture is emerging. CNAS's Hellscape for Taiwan is not an American academic report that descended out of thin air; it is more like the academic crystallization of a discursive framework that had already been brewing and spreading within Taiwan.
In terms of deterrence logic, the Kuma Academy says "use drones to create a hellscape so the enemy will not dare invade," U.S.-Taiwan Watch says "make dictators think the cost of using force is too high," and CNAS says "Hellscape shifts the strategic calculus" and "Taiwan would not need to win outright, it would just need to deny the PRC victory" - all three share the core proposition of the same deterrence theory.
That a report published by a think tank funded by U.S. arms manufacturers and assisted by Taipei's representative office in Washington aligns so closely with the discursive frameworks of multiple pro-DPP institutions inside and outside Taiwan may itself be the truest cross-section of the political ecology surrounding Taiwan's defense discourse.
As these institutions share the same problem consciousness, mutual citations, resource flows, and intersecting research paths have gradually produced a highly consistent discursive DNA. DSET provided convenience for CNAS's field research in Taiwan; CNAS cited GTI's missile research in its footnotes; GTI and U.S.-Taiwan Watch used the same set of budget figures; the Kuma Academy translated American analysts' tactical concepts into popular explanatory reporting for Taiwanese readers; and so on. By labeling any criticism of Taiwan's inadequate defense as "information manipulation," they built a firewall of public opinion around the ruling party's defense policy.
This is likely a transoceanic discursive project that, through the multiple forms of academic reports, policy analysis, media explainers, polling research, and information monitoring, continually produces and reproduces the same set of imaginaries and narratives about "hellscape" across both sides of the Taiwan Strait. When reports from American think tanks trigger echoes in Taipei's political and media circles, when arms makers' money flows into the fieldwork of strategic research, and when the convenience provided by diplomatic bodies is transformed into the discursive legitimacy of academic reports, we may need to ask a question that is hard to raise publicly on the island: Are Taiwanese people truly choosing a defense logic for themselves, or are they consuming a strategically designed discursive product that has been carefully engineered and reinforced from multiple directions?
The answer to that question, perhaps, is hidden behind those words that are synchronized a little too perfectly.
The sources compared in this article include: CNAS, Hellscape for Taiwan: Rethinking Asymmetric Defense (February 2026); the Kuma Academy, "Asymmetric Warfare to Resist China and Protect Taiwan: Unmanned Platforms Create a Hellscape for Invaders" (March 2025); Global Taiwan Institute, Taiwan's Emerging Indigenous Drone Industry-An Overview (February 2026); GTI, Taiwan's Missile Production Program (October 2024); GTI, The Contents and Controversies of Taiwan's Special Defense Budget (March 2026); GTI, Shrinking the Strait (January 2026); GTI, Making Time Work for Taiwan, Part 1 (March 2026); U.S.-Taiwan Watch, "Will the CCP Attack Taiwan in 2027?" (March 2026); and U.S.-Taiwan Watch, "The KMT Blocking Arms Procurement + a Cheng Li-wen Op-Ed" (March 2026).
