Taiwan Wants a Drone Army—but China Makes the Drones It Wants
Small, inexpensive drones are helping Ukraine hold off a better-equipped Russian army. For Taiwan, replicating that strategy risks relying on Chinese suppliers.
Updated June 23, 2024
TAIPEI—As drones transform warfare in Ukraine and Gaza, Taiwan is accelerating efforts to build a fleet of them for its defenses.
But the island democracy has a problem: The overwhelming majority of the types of small, inexpensive drones that are having the greatest impact on battlefields are made in China, the very country that poses a threat to it.
The importance of affordable drones has been demonstrated most vividly in Ukraine, where the Ukrainian army has deployed waves of them to spy on enemy movements and deliver explosives, helping it to hold off Russia’s much larger and better-equipped army.
Taiwan could find itself in a similarly lopsided conflict. China, which fields the world’s largest navy, claims the self-governed island as part of its territory and hasn’t ruled out the use of force to take control of it.
Taiwan has been studying Ukraine’s defense closely and is looking to adapt some of its tactics. Part of that effort is a drive to work with private companies to build a “national drone team.” In a March visit to a new drone research and development park in the southwestern city of Chiayi, the island’s then-President-elect Lai Ching-te said he aimed to make Taiwan the “Asian center for the democratic drone supply chain.”
The island’s first steps have been tentative. Taiwan’s Defense Ministry has proposed spending roughly $175 million to acquire some 3,200 drones from private contractors over the next five years.
That number will need to increase rapidly. Ukraine burns through roughly 10,000 such drones a month, according to the Royal United Services Institute, a British security think tank.
“Ukraine has taught us how material intensive this type of conflict can be. If resupply is a challenge, or not a certainty, then large stockpiling and protection of those stockpiles is essential for Taiwan before a conflict starts,” said Eric Gomez, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Cato Institute.
Rejecting U.S.-made drones as too glitchy and expensive, Ukraine’s military started out relying heavily on off-the-shelf drones from Chinese drone giant Da-Jiang Innovations, or DJI. As its needs grew, Ukraine quickly spun up a domestic drone industry using imported Chinese parts.
Taiwan can’t replicate that approach. The risk is too high that Chinese suppliers could help the Chinese military to hack into any drones being used by Taiwan’s military. As an island, Taiwan could also easily find its drone supplies cut off by a blockade.
Instead, Taiwan has to find a way to build up a large stockpile that circumvents the Chinese supply chain.
The challenge isn’t technical. Taiwan, which produces most of the world’s advanced semiconductors, has the know-how to build its own unmanned aircraft, according to local drone makers and industry analysts.
Instead, they say, it is a question of scale.
DJI owns three-quarters of the world’s consumer-drone market, according to market research firm Drone Industry Insights. The size of the Chinese industry is what enables it to crank out drones and their components at low prices, said Kay Wackwitz, chief executive of Drone Industry Insights. “And if you need a lot of something, you need low prices.”
Chen Kuan-lu, chairman of Taiwanese electronics company Thunder Tiger, says one key is the gimbal system. Combining an optical lens with thermal sensors and stabilizers, the gimbal serves as the heart of any reconnaissance drone. Taiwan already produces many of the components that go into gimbals, but most are shipped to China for assembly because of high labor costs on the island.
Gimbals made outside China are at least twice as expensive and can be difficult to source, according to Chen. He said he spent six months developing a prototype that incorporated gimbals from Israeli suppliers, but inventory evaporated after Israel launched its invasion of the Gaza Strip in October.
“I’m sorry,” he recalled one potential supplier saying to him. “All drones go to war now.”
Engines are another chokepoint. Jonson Huang, founder and chairman of drone maker Taiwan UAV, initially tried to replace a Chinese-made engine in a prototype drone for the Taiwanese military with an Australian alternative, but found it would cost 20 times more.
So Huang went to source locally. Most Taiwanese factories weren’t willing to collaborate, Huang said, because he couldn’t guarantee a large enough volume of orders.
He said he had to make at least five trips to a supplier in suburban Taipei, spending hours talking with the owner over rounds of tea, before finally inking a deal. “I’m doing this as an act of virtue,” Huang said, referring to his aspiration to contribute to Taiwan’s defense. “Without the belief behind it, I would have given up a long time ago.”
Such difficulties have led some to question whether Taiwan can really avoid Chinese drone parts.
“If we insist on a ‘non-red’ supply chain, meaning that we have to produce everything all on our own, we have to ask ourselves: Are there any vendors willing to lose money to do so?” said Chen Po-hung, a drone expert and policy analyst at the military-backed Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei. “Instead, we should ask, what are the critical components that shouldn’t be made in China?”
Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said it has worked across the government “to ensure national defense self-reliance and foster the domestic industrial chain, eliminate the red supply chain, and achieve the goal of rapidly and securely building combat readiness.”
There is little debate among defense analysts or officials that finding a way to accumulate a stockpile of drones is critical for Taiwan as it confronts the possibility of conflict with China.
“As we’ve seen in Ukraine, drones can be a way for the weaker side to do damage to the forces of the stronger side,” said David Ochmanek, a former Pentagon official who is currently a senior defense analyst at Rand.
Recalling his time at the front lines of Ukraine, Chen Hsi, a Taiwanese soldier who volunteered to fight Russia, said drones offer a direct and intuitive way to understand the situation on the battlefield.
“Without a drone, you’re at an absolute disadvantage,” Chen said. “Your enemies might know where you are, but you have no idea where they are, so you’re always the one getting ambushed.”
Washington, meanwhile, has also realized the pressing need for Taiwan to have a capable drone fleet. Last year, the Pentagon unveiled its so-called Replicator initiative, seeking at least a billion U.S. dollars to fund a program aiming to field “thousands of autonomous systems across domains within the next 18 to 24 months” to counter China’s increasing arms buildup.
The Pentagon said in May that it had secured about $500 million to carry out the first tranche of the Replicator program. On Wednesday, the State Department approved a new $360 million arms package for Taiwan that includes roughly 1,000 unmanned aircraft, including Switchblade loitering munitions that hurtle themselves toward a target and explode on impact.
It is hard to gauge how many drones Taipei would need in a war with Beijing. In the early phase of an invasion, the island would need to rely on more expensive drones such as the U.S.-made Reaper, which is heavily armed and can loiter for longer periods over water. Once the fighting reached land, it would need to switch to the smaller, cheaper, first-person-view drones laden with explosives.
The National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, known as the R&D wing of the Taiwanese military, has for years developed and manufactured drones for the armed forces, including an aircraftlike reconnaissance and strike drone called the Teng Yun. Some of them are already in service in the army and navy.
Taiwanese soldiers have begun using drones for reconnaissance in drills that simulate an attack by the Chinese military.
Taiwan is also investing in an antidrone program, the need for which came into focus in 2022, when Taiwanese soldiers on the outlying island of Kinmen resorted to throwing rocks at a Chinese drone that had flown over their camp.
After that incident, Taiwan’s military began working with Tron Future, a local radar-technology startup, to develop a system capable of jamming Chinese drones.
Tron Future’s chief executive Wang Yu-jiu said his company has been conducting tests with drones, including those made in China, to counter the smaller aircraft that Taiwan’s advanced radar systems might not be able to detect.
“China excels in low-cost manufacturing, but our defense and space products are critical to buy and they’re expensive,” Wang said. He added that he sees opportunities for Taiwan as there is a rising appetite for products without China components among his international clients.
“It’s not that Taiwan doesn’t have a good defense industry,” said Gomez, the Cato Institute analyst. “It just needs to get bigger.”
Write to Joyu Wang at joyu.wang@wsj.com