What Taiwan's military is learning from Ukraine PHOTO

The Japan Times has published an article where it says that although Ukraine's actions have reduced Taiwan's learning curve, Taipei still has a long way to go before putting all of the lessons learned into reality. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Should conflict erupt over Taiwan, the war would look very different from the one in Ukraine.

Among the main differences, Taipei would rely more on an air and sea denial strategy using anti-ship missiles and naval mines as opposed to Kyiv’s use of tanks and artillery to repel Russia’s ground invasion.

But despite these differences, Taiwan’s military has been drawing valuable lessons from Kyiv’s defensive operations, experts say, including the effectiveness of asymmetric defense as well as the need to stockpile munitions, increase resilience and self-sufficiency and keep supply and communication lines open for as long as possible.

Taipei is already implementing many of these lessons as China’s rapid military modernization has negated many of the defensive advantages Taiwan once had. Russia’s invasion has heightened the sense of urgency, driving home the pressing 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.

Another key takeaway is that Taiwan cannot rely on the assumption that other countries will directly come to its defense in a conflict with China.

In Europe, for instance, no NATO troops have been deployed to Ukraine, with Western nations supporting Kyiv with funding and weapons — but not soldiers.

The notion that Taiwan must first and foremost rely on itself for its sovereignty has led Taipei to focus its military strategy on securing an advantage over China’s much larger People’s Liberation Army, with most experts regarding an asymmetric defense approach as Taiwan’s most effective way to deter or resist an invasion.

This approach, which includes weapons, technologies and tactics designed to overcome gaps in equipment and defenses when facing a larger adversary, has played a key role in Kyiv’s defense efforts as Ukrainian forces continue to slow down Russia’s advance using relatively cost-efficient arms and munitions to destroy more expensive platforms.

Gaining an advantage

Taiwan has been raising defense spending in recent years to, among other things, further the implementation of its Overall Defense Concept, which relies heavily on an asymmetric approach.

Knowing that an invasion force would come largely by sea, some of the mobile, cost-effective assets being acquired include precision-guided munitions such as coastal defense missiles, unmanned systems, electronic jammers, fast-attack craft, missile assault boats, as well as kamikaze drones, sea mines and fast mine-laying ships. Most of these are being developed and produced domestically to boost self-sufficiency.

“Our military strategy is mainly defensive, so if it comes to blows, we will be struck first. This means we must ensure we can take a first and second hit while remaining capable of striking back,” said Wu Tzuli, an associate research fellow at the Taipei-based Institute for National Defense and Security Research (INDSR).

The approach also involves taking advantage of Taiwan’s geographic characteristics to make the best use of the island’s limited resources — there are only a few suitable locations for amphibious landing operations in Taiwan — and resorting to camouflage, redundancy, mobility and concealment to make it hard for the enemy to detect and attack Taiwanese forces.

The idea is to pursue a “denial strategy” to try and control access to the air and waters around Taiwan, thereby keeping Chinese forces at bay.

“I think the Taiwanese government has learned a great deal from Russia’s aggression in Ukraine by emphasizing the ‘integrated resilience’ component of Ukrainian’s resistance,” said Giulio Pugliese, an Asia-Pacific expert and lecturer at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies.

Effectively, he said, this has favored a further embrace of asymmetric capabilities to impose costs on China using “resilience and a ‘porcupine strategy’ that will fortify Taiwan’s ‘quills’ and make it harder for China to swallow the porcupine, so to speak, whether in a kinetic or hybrid/gray-zone attack.”

This, he added, is in line with Washington’s emphasis in getting Taiwan to do without big-ticket military purchases that have limited utility in Taiwan’s urban and mountainous areas.

Resilience is key

For this approach to be effective, Taiwan will likely require vast amounts of precision-guided munitions. As seen in Europe, Washington’s military assistance to Ukraine has depleted U.S. munition stockpiles, highlighting the need for Taiwan to boost domestic production, particularly of anti-ship and anti-air missiles, and maintain strategic stockpiles.

Another lesson is the importance of maintaining internal and external communications capabilities, as China would likely look to cut Taiwan’s critical undersea internet cables in any conflict.

In theory, the island, which lacks suitable satellite backups, could take a page from Ukraine and use Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite network. However, experts warn of overreliance on commercial actors with business interests in China, which is why Taipei has already started looking into other alternatives such as low-Earth orbit satellites, including so-called cube-satellites.

To improve resilience, Taipei also recently made it mandatory for male citizens to complete one year of military service — previously men were required to complete four months of training. Moreover, the government is strengthening critical infrastructure and military bases, lengthening and widening airstrips, increasing the number of mobile air-defense units and improving training for its reserve and civilian defense forces.

That said, INDSR’s Wu believes that lessons from Kyiv can go even further, arguing that Ukrainian forces have shown great flexibility modifying older Soviet platforms to deploy modern Western weapons and as well as giving local commanders more leeway to make their own decisions on the battlefield.

Furthermore, they have made innovative use of commercially available technologies, such as modifying off-the-shelf drones. “Taipei can learn from this,” he said, adding that Taiwanese forces also need to improve combined arms operations to make “the best possible use of our fighting resources.”

Enhancing resilience and self-sufficiency are key as China will, in all likelihood, try to impose a naval blockade and establish a no-fly zone around the island.

Even if fellow democracies were to directly intervene in support of Taipei, there is no guarantee that this would happen quickly, meaning that Taiwanese forces must be able to fight on their own until help arrives. It also means that Taipei needs to maintain large stockpiles of food, energy and other key supplies.

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 also further removed from many of its allies, meaning that support — including aid for potential refugees — would require more time to arrive since sea lanes and airspace would be contested. More importantly, Chinese missiles could destroy airstrips and ports making it difficult for aid to be offloaded.

Mindful of such tactics, Taiwanese defense planners are considering ways to prevent a blockade.

“We can only be resilient in a protracted conflict if we secure our supply chains,” Wu said, pointing to asymmetric capabilities such as anti-ship and anti-air missiles as well as submarines and drones, the latter of which could still operate even if Taiwan were to lose its runways and fighter jets early on.

In Ukraine, many had assumed Russia would quickly achieve aerial superiority. But well over a year into the conflict that hasn’t materialized, giving hope for Taipei that it could achieve a similar feat and keep supply lines open.

Lessons for Beijing

But Taiwan is not the only one drawing lessons from Ukraine.

Chinese military publications indicate Beijing is also monitoring the situation to learn from the successes and failures on both sides of the war.

Obervers say Beijing might even take a page from Russian leader Vladimir Putin, brandishing nuclear weapons to try and prevent a direct intervention by the U.S. and its allies such as Japan.

Some argue that Russia’s troubled invasion serves as a stark warning to Beijing. However, deterrence is also dependent on how important it is for an aggressor to achieve a certain goal.

While Ukraine’s actions have shortened the learning curve for Taiwan, experts agree that Taipei still has some way to go before it has put into practice all of the takeaways.

At the same time, many hope that deterrence efforts and political maneuvering will be enough to prevent a cross-strait conflict that would have disastrous consequences for the region.

“I think nobody wants war because it’s a matter of life and death,” Wu said.

“If it comes, of course, we need to be ready, but we always hope leaders will be wise and that cooler heads will prevail.”