Inside Taiwan's plan to deter a Chinese invasion | DW News

Taiwan is testing its defenses this week as it launches its biggest annual military exercises. The Han Kuang military exercises involves troops on the strategically important Penghu Islands rehearsing ways of using tanks, artillery and anti-aircraft guns to repel a Chinese assault. Reservists are also taking part as Taiwan seeks to increase the realism of its wartime preparations. For the first time, authorities are deliberately slowing mobile internet on parts of the island to test how people would cope if communications were disrupted during a conflict. The drills come as Taiwan pushes ahead with a new strategy built around drones, unmanned attack boats and mobile missile units. The aim is to make any Chinese invasion so difficult and costly that Beijing would be deterred from trying. A concept US military planners have described as creating a hellscape around the island. Stacey Pettyjohn is a senior fellow and director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security. That's an independent Washington-based national security think tank. She co-authored a report on Taiwan's drone defense strategy this year. Welcome to DW. This hellscape idea sounds relatively simple. Throw huge numbers of cheap mobile drones in the path of the bigger invading force. Is it that simple? Not quite that simple, but it does end up being simpler than the type of amphibious assault that Chinese forces would have to undertake to attack the island, which is one of its strengths. It really does rely on using lots of small mobile units with cheap drones, air drones, sea drones, undersea drones, and trying to attrit an invasion force before they actually reach Taiwan's shores. Okay, so not so much repelling an invasion as trying to stop it before it actually gets started. For years, Taiwanese... Sorry, go on. No, it makes... I mean, the point at which the Chinese are the most vulnerable is when they're on the ocean and they're visible. They have to approach Taiwan and concentrate their forces, and there are a limited number of beaches that are really favorable for a amphibious landing. And so that gives Taiwan the advantage that they can leverage with their geography, along with these multi-domain drones to get them when they are exposed. Okay, this is all very sneaky. Let's talk about asymmetry, because we've seen many of the lessons of this, what they're calling asymmetric warfare, where a smaller, apparently weaker country finds itself able to defend itself or indeed resist a larger military force. We've seen this play out in Ukraine and Iran, I guess. Are there lessons being learned from these conflicts? Absolutely. I think a lot of the lessons from Ukraine apply directly to Taiwan. Obviously, the geography is a little bit different, and it's a maritime theater, and you're worrying about China having to cross that strait and move a huge number of forces. But the idea of using small drones to go after larger forces that have big weapons platforms, big ships, aircraft, and tanks that are very visible is one that is directly applicable. I think it's also important to note that drones alone aren't sufficient to achieve this. You need to use drones in concert with more traditional weapons, like higher-end missiles, artillery, as well as mines. Limiting the mobility of your adversary is something that has worked well for both Ukraine and Russia. They use a lot of mines on the ground, but you can use sea mines in the case of Taiwan, and then also mine the beaches to make it hard and to slow down the movement of any Chinese forces, which then gives you more opportunities to use aerial drones and drone boats to attack them. Right. But of course, China will also have been watching what's going on in Ukraine and Iran. So how much will Beijing's offensive playbook have been rewritten because of this technology? China's very much observing what's going on and trying to learn from it, and I would imagine receiving pretty direct feedback from the Russians, given some of the assistance that they've provided. I would expect that China's going to also be looking at employing drones. We've seen in a recent military parade that they also had a lot of counter-drone technology. But there's a difference between actually employing these new capabilities and doing so in a way when you're undertaking a massive operation that is joint, and that is truly one of the most complex things that any military can do. That's an amphibious assault. So while I believe they certainly are learning and will adapt and continue to adapt, there's no perfect solution that will be durable for a long time because everyone learns and changes in response to what they see their adversary doing and what works in other places in the world. Is there a danger, certainly from the likes of me looking at this from the outside, is there a danger of becoming too fixated on the technology? Does the effective deployment of this new kit, does it demand a sort of shift in thinking and philosophy? It does. The technology by itself is not at all the solution. When you asked me in the beginning, is it as simple as using drones? Well, using drones effectively is not actually that simple. And that is one of the big takeaways that the Taiwanese should be learning from what is going on in Ukraine. Ukraine spends a tremendous amount of time training its drone force and giving it real world operational experience. And that is something that will be hard to develop in peacetime. And the Taiwanese are going to need to do that. This involves lots of training and actually keeping people in the military long enough that they develop deep enough of expertise and become skilled enough at these systems and employing them with other weapons at the same time. Operating as small independent units, which typically right now the Taiwanese military does not do. And then this probably would portend some changes for the organization of the military. The traditional formations that they have right now are typical military structures that are designed around large platforms, whether they be tanks, fighter aircraft, ships. And most of those weapons are going to struggle to survive in the first phase if China were to attack because they would begin with a huge bombardment of the island and would likely be able to find these bigger weapons that are easy to see. OK, so we have a world that has now woken up to the potential of this cheaper, more nimble method of warfare. And so, of course, now there is a scramble to get hold of the necessary technologies. For example, Taiwan says it wants more than 210,000 airborne and maritime drones. Are they going to be bottlenecks in supply? There will be a lot of bottlenecks and they're not going to be as cheap as they want them to be because they're not going to be wanting to rely on Chinese parts and components. And there are some sectors that China really dominates. And obviously, DGI and Autel are two of the biggest drone companies worldwide commercially. But China dominates other sectors like brushless motors that are really important. And I think it's going to be important for Taiwan to find like-minded countries where they can pool their demand and begin to drive down the price of some of these subcomponents to establish trusted supply chains instead of Chinese ones. But Taiwan also actually needs to pass the full budget. One of the striking things recently in politics is that with the big special defense budget under consideration, it has funded the purchase of American drones. But one of the areas that the opposition parties rejected was funding the domestic Taiwanese industry, which they really need to build up. And there's an opportunity there for them to do so because they have the labor, they have the knowledge that they could build this up relatively easily, unlike some other weapons like submarines, where it's really difficult to scale production of something that complicated. And is it the United States that is the obvious first port of call when you're looking to buy this technology, if it's not China? I mean, the U.S. doesn't actually have a robust small drone industry right now. It's trying to develop one itself. So I know Taiwan has been selling some of the drones it manufactures and entered into some cooperative agreements with some countries in Eastern Europe that are very much interested in acquiring this technology themselves and providing it to the Ukrainians. The U.S. hopefully will begin to improve its own drone industry, and therefore it would be a natural partner. But right now, the U.S. is in somewhat of the same boat as Taiwan. And it remains to be seen whether the Trump administration's drone dominance initiative will result in the type of drone industrial ecosystem that the U.S. really needs. So if we end where we started, could a hell-scaped Taiwan realistically stop a Chinese invasion without direct U.S. military intervention? I believe that it could. When you look at an amphibious assault, it is so, so hard to do. And it relies on really meticulous planning and timing of a large number of forces over a huge area to get enough troops ashore that you can establish a lodgement and then you have to move on. All of those factors really are stacked in Taiwan's favor, plus its geography of its narrow beaches, its limited number of beaches, and then mountainous terrain. I think that if Taiwan were to wholeheartedly embrace this, change its force structure so that it's designed around executing this type of concept, train its forces, and acquire this technology, that it would be possible. It's enough to make any Chinese leader think long and hard about whether they can really actually successfully invade the island. Good talking to you. Thanks for talking us through that so clearly. Stacey Pettyjohn from the Center for a New American Security. Thanks for having me.