by Brian Hioe

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Photo Credit: Vnonymous/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0

TAIWAN HAS SEEN increased Chinese military activity around it in the preceding days. This appears to be in reaction to a US arms sale to Taiwan.

The 360.2 million USD arms sale was approved by the Biden administration on June 18th. In particular, the arms deal will provide Taiwan with more than one thousand of two kinds of suicide drones. These are 720 Switchblade 300 Loitering Missile System and 291 Altius 600M-V UAVs.

The drone sales are to boost Taiwan’s asymmetric defense capacity, at a time when American experts have called on Taiwan to increase asymmetric defense rather than staking Taiwan’s defense on traditional weapons platforms. This has become an object of contention between Taiwan and the US at times, with the US seeking to pressure Taiwan into reliance on asymmetric weapons systems in the view that this would be more effective for Taiwan in warding off Chinese threats.

Namely, asymmetric defense has been seen as having been employed to great success in Ukraine. Specifically, asymmetric defense is seen as having allowed Ukraine to ward off an enemy that is many times larger, in employing aerial and maritime drones, loitering munitions, and other means of outmaneuvering Russia’s much larger, but more traditional army that is, on the other hand, reliant on such platforms.

Among the champions of asymmetric defense in Taiwan is Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, the former Chief of the General Staff of the ROC, who wrote a book arguing for the utility of asymmetric defense. There has been some pushback in Taiwan, however.

Namely, it is hard to justify scaling back traditional weapons platforms to the branches of the military that are built around them. Likewise, politicians often have their eye on traditional weapons platforms that are flashy and can be touted as policy wins, inclusive of Taiwan’s much-vaunted domestic submarine program. That is, even though much discussion was previously that submarines could significantly change the calculus for naval operations in the event of a Chinese invasion, they would still be considered an expensive and resource-intensive traditional weapons platform.

At the same time, part of the concern about transitioning to asymmetric defense is that this would leave Taiwan dependent on the US for munitions, even as there are questions about the potential flip-flops the US could see in its Taiwan policy–particularly if Donald Trump were to win a second political term. To this extent, traditional weapons platforms are still necessary for countering grey-zone activity.

Either way, China stepped up its naval incursions and air incursions as a response to the arms sale. Up until 6 AM of June 18th, 20 aircraft and 7 navy vessels were detected. The next day there were 18 aircraft and 6 navy vessels. On the 20th, this was 11 aircraft and 8 vessels, while on the 21st this was 36 aircraft and 7 vessels, and on the 22nd this was 41 aircraft and 7 navy vessels. On the 22nd, the Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense also reported detecting a satellite launch that passed over Taiwan, though stressed that it was monitoring and had a grasp of the situation and that the satellite launch posed no harm to Taiwan.

China has increased its military activity around Taiwan in past years. This began after the visit to Taiwan in August 2022 by then-US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, as the first Speaker of the House to visit Taiwan in 25 years. Since then, China has held a large-scale military exercise around Taiwan annually.

Such exercises are meant to intimidate and send a message–not only to Taiwan, but also the US. Furthermore, sometimes China launches exercises in response to what are fundamentally American actions, rather than Taiwanese ones, even if China does escalate military activity after major Taiwanese political events such as the presidential inauguration.

As China has ramped up military activity, this serves as not only a means of intimidating Taiwan, but also a means of probing Taiwan’s defense and giving its troops an opportunity to rehearse future military action. Yet the way in which China expands what repertoire of events it claims are provocations on the scale of necessitating further military exercises, too, is worth noting. This evidently also includes arms sales from the US at present.
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