CHINA WATCHTaiwan May Yet Become a Porcupine
It’s early days, but the signs are strong that Taiwan’s new government will insist on much more of a porcupine strategy for national defense than many officers in the country’s hidebound armed forces have been willing to accept.
It’s early days, but the signs are strong that Taiwan’s new government will insist on much more of a porcupine strategy for national defense than many officers in the country’s hidebound armed forces have been willing to accept.
If it succeeds, the island should be far more capable of fending off a conquest by China, and the armed forces will have to give up some of the traditional and glamorous but highly vulnerable weaponry that they are so fond of.
Much of the defense budget would shift to small and easily hidden systems that could threaten an invasion fleet, ground forces that have landed or aircraft supporting them. From China’s point of view, Taiwan would resemble a porcupine, covered in innumerable quills and hard to touch.
President Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party took office in May. His
new defense minister, Wellington Koo, set out key aspects of military policy direction in an initial report to the legislature in June.
This included developing ‘asymmetric warfare’, a term used in Taiwan for the porcupine strategy. The focus would be on achieving ‘precision, mobility, lethality, dispersion, survivability and cost effectiveness,’ Koo said. A little over a week later, Koo doubled down, saying that the island’s strategy of deterrence would be based on ‘asymmetric’ thinking.
The porcupine strategy has become Taiwan’s most efficient means of defense because the island can no longer match China conventionally—say, by meeting high-performance fighters with comparable aircraft in comparable numbers. In those circumstances, it cannot apply its former strategy of fighting China’s forces across the breadth of the Taiwan Strait and wearing them down through attrition. Taiwan’s defense budget for 2024 is NT$606.8 billion ($27.6 billion), dwarfed by China’s official military spending of 1.6 trillion yuan ($327 billion), which doesn’t include all spending on the armed services.
The porcupine strategy would focus on a decisive battle in Taiwan’s littoral, where Chinese forces would be most easily detected and hit. Weapons and sensors would tend to be small, cheap, numerous and easily hidden; many would have only short range. For example, Chinese warships could be attacked using sea mines or with missiles mounted on trucks that were dispersed and concealed in Taiwan’s forests or cities. Much of the budget would shift away from buying expensive and conventional equipment, such as big armored vehicles and fighters.
