As Beijing steps up what Taipei views as "gray zone" harassment in a bid to challenge Taiwanese sovereignty, the island’s military said in its latest national defense report that it is drawing lessons from the war in Ukraine in its efforts to counter China.
Released Tuesday, the biennial report indicated that Taiwan’s National Defense Ministry is learning from Kyiv's defensive strategy, including the effectiveness of asymmetric operations and the need to improve decentralized command capabilities.
It also pointed to an ongoing push by the self-governed island to increase resilience and self-sufficiency, prioritize the domestic defense industry and beef up its “all-out-defense” capabilities by acquiring less-conventional weapons, realigning its forces and promoting a whole-of-society defense approach.
“We have been using an innovative and asymmetric mindset to build up an overall credible combat power to exploit the vulnerability” of a potential Chinese military invasion, Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng wrote in the paper, adding, “We will not yield an inch of our sovereign lands and will be unwavering in upholding democracy and freedom.”
In its report, the ministry accused China — which sees democratic Taiwan as a breakaway province that needs to be reunited with the mainland — of altering the status quo in recent years by seeking to establish a “new normal” through harmful “gray zone” tactics below the threshold of war.
This includes activities such as deploying drones, civil aircraft and survey ships near Taiwan; launching cyberattacks against key government agencies and infrastructure; and increasing “the scale, frequency, and intensity of drills and exercises” to ramp up preparations for an invasion.
More specifically, China’s People's Liberation Army (PLA) has been stepping up the number of multiservice landing drills, reconnaissance operations and incursions into the island’s self-declared air defense identification zone (ADIZ). In the latest such incident Taipei said Thursday that 68 PLA aircraft had been spotted flying near the island within a 24-hour period, 40 of which entered Taiwan's southwestern ADIZ.
The report also said that China is bolstering its air power along its coast facing Taiwan by completing the construction of airfields and permanently stationing new fighters and drones there to form “a superior air power, put pressure on air defense, and seize air superiority.”
“China is progressively enhancing its capabilities to invade Taiwan, such as A2/AD (anti-access/area denial), maritime blockade, and rapid triphibious operations,” warned the defense ministry, while emphasizing the need to counter this by absorbing lessons from the Ukraine war.
Before the conflict, Taiwan’s military had already begun implementing asymmetric defense concepts, as China’s rapid military modernization has negated many of the defensive advantages the island once had. However, Russia’s Ukraine invasion has heightened the sense of urgency, driving home the need to be prepared for any contingency.
Both Taiwan and Ukraine are up against much larger military powers, an asymmetry that lies at the heart of many of the takeaways from the conflict in Europe, including that a nation’s security cannot rely solely on security assurances or promises of peace.
Although islands typically offer the defender an advantage by forcing the attacker to undertake an amphibious landing, the lack of a land border makes it difficult for neighbors to supply Taiwan with weapons and other critical resources, unlike in Ukraine.
Taiwan is therefore following an increasingly self-reliant, multipronged approach that, among other things, takes advantage of the island’s geographic characteristics and makes the best use of its limited resources.
This means building upon established littoral and coastal defense capabilities and using Taiwan's urban and mountainous areas to strengthen multidomain defense lines, while resorting to camouflage, redundancy, mobility and concealment to make it hard for the PLA to detect and attack Taiwanese forces.
There are only a few suitable locations for amphibious landing operations in Taiwan, so the idea is to pursue a “denial strategy” in strategic areas to try to control access to the air and waters around Taiwan, thereby keeping Chinese forces at bay.
To help achieve this, Taiwan has been rapidly acquiring long-range, precision and mobile weapons as well as unmanned and AI-enabled systems, including drones, the report stated.
Taiwan has not only been buying these systems from the U.S., but has also been developing them at home, with the island’s top military research unit unveiling in March a series of domestic attack and surveillance drones, including a loitering munition that is similar in appearance to the U.S.-made AeroVironment Switchblade 300 drone deployed by Ukraine.
Another lesson Taipei is drawing is the need to improve operational resilience by decentralizing command and control. This, experts say, will be crucial to enable units deployed on the battlefield to complete assigned missions should communications with central command be disrupted.
“If the Russo-Ukraine War has taught us anything, it is that smaller — not bigger — and maneuverable Ukrainian detachments operating autonomously can inflict substantial damage on far larger, conventional Russian forces by using man-portable weapons, and aided by new technology offered by commercial and nontraditional defense enterprises,” said James Char, a defense expert at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
At the same time, Taiwan plans to extend its defense space outward to coastal areas and monitor “obvious” invasion indicators, said the ministry.
Wu Tzuli, an associate research fellow at the Taipei-based Institute for National Defense and Security Research, pointed out that in such cases Taiwan could “pre-emptively strike” a mobilizing invasion force using a range of assets such as high-performance warships, mobile anti-ship missile launchers and drones.
Moreover, the island has been honing its electronic and cyberwarfare capabilities as part of efforts to improve joint operations. This strategy, the ministry said, is based on the principle of “using technology to strengthen manpower and applying firepower before deploying troops.”
The overall aim of these long-range and multidomain approaches is to “impose unacceptable risk and cost on any enemy invasion,” the ministry said.
Meanwhile, Taiwan has been realigning its forces, with the report stating that the volunteer service members are set to man the “main” or regular forces, while those conscripted — who from next year have to serve one year instead of four months — will make up the “garrisoning” forces. Former garrisoning forces are to be transformed into regular forces and used to supplement the backbone manpower of the reserve forces.
But perhaps the greatest lesson Taiwan is drawing from the Ukraine war is the need to promote civil-defense courses and deepen communication with civil society in an effort to build a whole-of-society approach to make the island more resilient.
To encourage this, the ministry published in June an “all-out-defense handbook” outlining safety precautions to help civilians deal with all possible situations during war such as food and water shortages, air raids and large fires, while explaining basic survival skills and providing emergency hotlines.
“Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown the world, including Taiwan, the importance of national defense,” Char said.
Taipei also understands that having a mentally-resilient civilian population is a “necessary complement to an operationally-capable military,” he added.
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