Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: 玄史生/WikiCommons/CC0
THE KMT AND TPP have blocked committee review of a 210 billion NT special budget for drones, which would have funded domestic procurement of drones.
The special budget would have provided for the purchase of mostly maritime drones, consisting of 208,200 coastal attack drones, 1,446 coastal reconnaissance drones, and 1,320 uncrewed surface vessels. This occurs at a time when experts have warned that Taiwan needs to step up the number of drones it has available in the event of war scenarios, with Ukraine regularly expending tens of thousands of drones in combat with Russia.
For its part, the TPP and KMT have proposed their own versions of drone procurement legislation. The legislation proposed by the TPP and KMT aims to give require the legislature to sign off on further spending, giving the two parties more control over drone development initiatives in the future.
Previous TPP special budgets for military purchases had been criticized. First, TPP chair Huang Kuo-chang was accused of taking confidential documents of the Lai administration’s version of defense spending out of the meeting room in order to photograph them, so as to allow the TPP to draft its own version. Afterward, the version of the bill that was produced by the TPP was criticized as being amateurishly written, in that it limited arms purchases to 82 HIMARS multiple rocket launcher systems, 60 M109A self-propelled howitzers, 70 Javelin anti-tank missile systems, 24 TOW-2B anti-tank missile systems, as well as missile-firing drones.
Specifically, criticisms were that the version of the bill produced by the TPP did not conform to how arms procurement bills are normally written. As such, Taiwan would be limited to buying certain kinds of ammunition that it may not need, in that the only precision artillery it was allowed to buy is M109A artillery shells, potentially leading to shortages in terms of actual defense usage. The bill also did not provide funding for the storage or maintenance of equipment, which would lead to the degradation of such equipment, and still cut 70% of funding from defense spending.
As for the KMT, one notes that in past defense spending proposals, the KMT criticized the idea of purchasing arms from the US. Leaning into US-skeptic narratives increasingly in political circulation in Taiwan, the KMT claimed that the US was foisting useless arms onto Taiwan in order to politically profit, when they might not be genuinely useful for Taiwan’s defense.
But when the KMT eventually approved some level of defense spending, it still proved to be US weapons sales that were mostly allowed for. Domestic capabilities, such as drones, were cut –again, even if experts have increasingly taken the view that drones would be critical for the asymmetric defense that Taiwan needs to face a much larger enemy such as China.
For its part, the KMT has leaned into traditional narratives, suggesting that drones are a new and untested form of technology and that the DPP is attempting to push for drone technology merely to benefit drone companies to which it is close. The KMT has suggested that the companies that the DPP wishes to purchase drones from are unknown and are simply linked to the party.
Indeed, the KMT has leaned into such claims regarding everything from domestically developed and manufactured COVID-19 vaccines to green energy initiatives and Taiwan’s domestic submarine program. In this sense, the KMT has increasingly leaned into skepticism regarding Taiwan’s domestic capacities in addition to US-skepticism. Attacking the drone budget has been no different.
The Chinese government evidently views drones as a major threat to any invasion plans, and blocking drone funding opens the KMT up to accusations that it is taking directives from China so as to sabotage Taiwan’s defenses. Still, that the KMT and TPP were pressured into passing some form of drone spending probably speaks to public interest in the issue.