Taiwan May Yet Become a Porcupine
‘The Ukraine war has given us a big lesson that, even if you are the smaller one or the weaker one, you still have a chance to survive and resist successfully,’ says retired Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, who created the porcupine approach in what was called the Overall Defense Concept. It was adopted in 2017 but, Lee said in an interview with The Strategist, abandoned by the military two years later.
Lai, inclined towards Taiwanese independence, may have appointed Koo to shake things up. Formerly the head of Taiwan’s national security council, Koo is Taiwan’s first civilian minister of national defense in more than a decade. To Taiwan’s military, he is an outsider.
The armed forces have resisted adopting the porcupine strategy obviously because officers want to keep combat modes that they’re accustomed to and like big, flashy equipment that they can be proud of. Apart from fighters that could hardly be kept operational on airfields plastered by Chinese strike missiles, examples include four 10,000-ton destroyers that would be easily sunk if they stayed anywhere near the island in a war.
Historical legacy worsens the military’s rigid top-down culture and bureaucratic resistance to change: it was once part of the then authoritarian Nationalist Party (KMT), which imposed dictatorship on Taiwan from 1949 to 1987. Previous defense ministers have often been retired generals or admirals, who have tended to allocate funds and choose programs to suit the desires of the service they came from, regardless of the needs of national defense.
Taiwanese defense analysts close to the military have defended such choices. Lately they’ve tried to argue that the visible presence of big and expensive weaponry is good for public morale. They add that China gets a deterrent message from the United States when such equipment is sold to Taiwan. This dodges the problem that the stuff can be quickly obliterated in a war.
Perhaps the best argument for conventional defense equipment is that some of it, such as the F-16 fighter force, is needed to counter China’s grey zone warfare. During peacetime, warplanes help to ward off China’s frequent incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone.
The United States has been pushing Taiwan to adopt a porcupine strategy and has refused to supply weapons that don’t suit one. For example, insiders say, in 2022 it rejected a Taiwanese request for Sikorsky MH-60R anti-submarine helicopters, which would be easily shot down.
But the United States has approved supply of two kinds of loitering munitions (one-way drones) to Taiwan: Switchblade 300s and Altius 600M-Vs. Inexpensive and launched by small groups of soldiers who would be hard to detect, those are the sorts of weapons that would make sharp quills on the porcupine.
Jane Rickards, a journalist and frequent contributor to The Economist, has lived in Taiwan since 2004. This article is published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
