Notes from Central Taiwan: Taiwan needs more than a missile shield
As China’s strike capabilities grow and interceptor stocks remain limited, Taiwan must pair air defense with a credible capacity to retaliate and disrupt the forces sustaining an attack
Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “has developed hypersonic glide vehicles that can launch air-to-air weapons, an advancement meant to threaten high-value targets such as command-and-control aircraft thousands of miles away.”
Military Watch magazine reported in 2024 on one of the designs: “the vehicle is designed with payload options that include electronic warfare and reconnaissance suites, as well as bombs and both supersonic and subsonic drones that detach from the vehicle during flight,” while noting that the PRC is a world leader in such technologies.
The threat from the PRC is not only increasing, but expanding and evolving.
Photo courtesy of the Presidential Office
Meanwhile the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the sister paper of the Taipei Times) reported this week that draft-eligible men is expected to fall below 80,000 by next year, thanks to collapsing birth rates. Inevitably, the military is short of personnel. One solution would be a “foreign legion” approach offering citizenship to those who serve, especially to foreign soldiers with small children. But that requires the kind of imagination our leaders sorely lack.
National Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology last week released the technical specifications for the Chiang Kung (強弓) missile (also known as the Tien Kung IV, 天弓四型), seemingly hoping to influence the legislative “debate” on the defense budget. Funding for the advanced high altitude interceptor is not included in the defense budget recently passed by the legislature. Hence, it has to be funded through a supplementary budget.
The budget problems have disrupted the military’s planning for a the “T-Dome” missile defense program. The legislature, controlled by the pro-China Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), is well aware of the effects of its funding decisions on weapons development and acquisition programs.
TT file photo
There’s entirely too much focus in the pundit world on the possibility of a pro-China politician taking the presidency in 2028 and delivering Taiwan to the PRC. In fact that appears to be quietly unfolding in the legislature (weirdly that argument appears to apply only to a pro-China president). Once again I quote Taiwanese historian Lee Hsiao-Feng (李筱峰) who observed in the Independence Evening Post (自立晚報) in 2001 that if one day Beijing wants to take Taiwan, the first place they attack will be the Legislative Yuan.
Last week the Economist reported on the dismal state of the US defense industrial base, made obvious by the idiotic war on Iran.
“Taiwan worries that 102 [Patriot missiles] ordered years ago will not arrive this year as scheduled,” it said, adding: “Lockheed Martin, which makes the most advanced version, the PAC-3 MSE, says it cannot guarantee delivery times to any foreign client, given the Pentagon’s power to divert them.”
TT file photo
An Aug. 4 Heritage Foundation study, cited by the Economist, estimated that, under its baseline assumptions for a major Indo-Pacific conflict with China, US forces could require roughly 19,400 PAC-3 MSE and 5,500 THAAD interceptors, in addition to thousands of ship-based SM-3 and SM-6 interceptors. Even the report’s more optimistic scenario required about 7,100 PAC-3 MSEs and 1,400 THAAD interceptors, plus substantial naval inventories — far more than the US currently possesses or can quickly produce.
“At current inventory levels,” the report states, “the PLA could render key US bases… unable to sustain adequate operational tempo or render them inoperable within the opening days of a conflict.” Iranian attacks on US bases in the Gulf have caused damage, casualties and operational disruption.
Ballistic missiles fired by aggressors are much cheaper than the missiles necessary to intercept them, while drones are peanuts by comparison. Worse, typically the defender fires two or more missiles to raise the probability of an intercept. Hence, many nations have moved to attacking missile launchers and to strikes elsewhere in the enemy nation to make the aggressor stop, as Ukraine is currently attempting. However, attacking launchers and bases was the US approach to Iran, with mixed results.
Consciously or not, our deterrence focuses on rendering a PRC attack on Taiwan pointless by improving our defenses so that the cost is too great for the results achieved. What the US debacle in the Strait of Hormuz shows is that modern ballistic and drone technologies are so good that even destroying large numbers of launchers is unlikely to defeat them. Nor can they easily be intercepted.
Moreover, let’s assume total optimism. We give the US-Taiwan missile defense 100 percent effectiveness. All incoming missiles and drones are knocked down. The PRC attack is defeated. Taiwan’s missile defenses will then be expended. Does anyone think the PRC will never try again? Who will rebuild their missile packages more rapidly, Taiwan-US-Japan or the PRC?
Perhaps it is not our deterrence that is failing, but our conception of it. Those who argue that we should throw in the towel and opt for some form of surrender (“make a deal”) because we probably can’t stop the PRC’s missiles are carefully avoiding mentioning another form of deterrence that makes more sense: deterrence by punishment. The appeal of “make a deal” lies in the misconception of deterrence as a program of knocking back an attack. It should be a program of degrading an attack while applying massive, unacceptable damage to the aggressor.
Deterrence by punishment offers both a powerful deterrent effect, and in the case of war, the ability to degrade or eliminate manufacturing and logistics facilities that will be used for the PRC to recover its missile forces. It can even be escalated in a fine-grain, tit-for-tat way, if desired. They hit our ports, we hit theirs, and so on.
It is now easier to see why the PRC hates Taiwan’s drone development program: it equips Taiwan with the ability to strike not only landing craft and ships in an invasion, not only launchers and bases, but also manufacturing and logistics sites (as Ukraine is doing). I suspect that this capability is what the PRC truly objects to, and that this possibility is a major deterrent to attacks. That alone is argument for a shift in the way deterrence is thought about.
What should Taiwan do? To a certain extent it is already committed to strikes on the PRC, but that must be vastly expanded. Among other things, it should rapidly expand its current Hsiung Feng III (“Brave Wind”) missile production, and build out a stockpile of strike drones, including a core of long-range strike drones that can reach factories deep inside the PRC. Once again, it should turn its currently useless high school and college military education courses into courses in drone flying, civil defense and first aid.
The South China Morning Post reported this week that PRC intimidation ship patrols hit a record high for the third month in a row last month.
How much longer do we have?