To prepare for a possible all-out war with China, Taiwan should focus on fielding substantial numbers of cheap, mobile, and survivable weapons, a former top Taiwanese defense official said.
Taiwan currently faces two types of conflict — what experts and officials have referred to as China’s gray-zone activities that are just below the threshold of war and the potential for a full-scale Chinese invasion. Countering both requires an array of weaponry.
At a Hudson Institute think tank event earlier this month, retired admiral and former chief of the general staff for Taiwan’s defense ministry Lee Hsi-Min said Taiwan needed to prioritize the existential threat of a Chinese invasion. Gray-zone actions, such as frequent aircraft incursions, strain resources and stress assets and troops. The other could be catastrophic, as war games have shown.
“We need a large number of the distributed, mobile, survivable, lethal” weapons, Lee argued, and those systems need to be low-cost, high-volume, and highly survivable in a fight, he added.
Asymmetric warfare is a strategy that uses large numbers of inexpensive, mobile, hard-to-target systems — like drones, missiles, and dispersed units — to blunt a larger military’s advantages by denying it easy targets and inflicting outsized damage. Think drones blowing up tanks in Ukraine or sinking Russian warships.
Lee argues that Taiwan’s survival in a war against China depends on exactly this kind of strategy.
GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images
Taiwan has aggressively pursued a strategy focused on weapons that fit these bills, including various types of drones, sensors, jamming, and anti-ship and surface-to-air missiles. Broader elements of increased investments in asymmetric warfare plans include how the civilian population of Taiwan is trained for a potential Chinese invasion and how the Taiwanese military would use urban warfare to hold off Chinese forces.
This doesn’t mean conventional platforms and high-end weapons aren’t valuable, Lee said, especially for helping Taiwan deter the everyday activities the Chinese military engages in, such as aggressive actions in the air and sea and massive exercises regularly held nearby. However, “we need scalable” and “smart enough” weapons, he said.
“If we are conducting the protracted war, sometimes the quantity means quality,” Lee said. “If we only have a kind of a small number of the advanced, sophisticated platform, I think we will have a big problem if China decided to attack Taiwan.”
Similar lessons are being learned from the war in Ukraine. Soldiers, veterans, and drone makers have all said that a limited arsenal of exquisite systems isn’t the right fit for a long war. The need is large volumes of cheap weapons. In warfare, sustainability is key. Overengineering and overspending simply aren’t sustainable in a high-end fight.
Lee previously argued for asymmetric warfare and more mobile, uncrewed weapons and systems rather than buying more conventional weaponry like fighter jets and tanks in his “Overall Defense Concept.”
In 2020, he wrote in an article for The Diplomat that the idea is based on the premise that China will continue to see claiming Taiwan as a national and existential priority and Beijing will keep pouring money and resources into its military, which is vastly out-scaling Taiwan.
Anadolu/Anadolu via Getty Images
Taiwan’s government budgets for defense have increased substantially in recent years, and it continues to buy missiles, air defense systems, and drones from the US and other allies and partners.
But given the significant disparity between China and Taiwan’s militaries and capabilities, “Taiwan must abandon notions of a traditional war of attrition with the PLA [People’s Liberation Army],” Lee and co-author Eric Lee, then a researcher at the Project 2049 Institute, wrote.
Taiwan faces a substantially stronger adversary, and thus “embracing an effective asymmetric defense posture and incorporating tactical asymmetric capabilities could compensate for Taiwan’s disadvantage on paper and prevent the PLA from getting boots on the ground,” they argued.
At the moment, Taiwan is leaning on a mix of capabilities. This month, the US announced its largest-ever weapons sale to Taiwan, at $11 billion. It includes High-Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems, Army Tactical Missile Systems, Javelin missiles, howitzers, and drones.
Taiwan’s defense ministry said the weapons help bolster its self-defense and deterrence capabilities. China’s foreign ministry said the sale violated agreements between Beijing and Washington and risked military confrontation with Taiwan.
An important piece of Taiwan’s asymmetric strategy is rapid investment in domestic drone production, informed by lessons from Ukraine and collaborations with US and European firms. Taipei aims to produce 200,000 drones annually by 2030 and is investing billions into other defense systems, including a new air-defense network known as T-Dome.
