The conflict in Ukraine, now in its fifth year, has provided extraordinary lessons about the future of war. The enormous impact of cheap, remotely piloted unmanned systems—on the ground, in the air, and at sea—cannot be overstated. But there is a danger that military strategists will look at the battlefield in Ukraine and see little more than a catalog of weapons to buy.
Although lessons about particular weapons systems are relevant, the more important lesson is about the ecosystem necessary for these new tools to be effective. Ukraine, for instance, has developed Sky Fortress, a network of 14,000 acoustic sensors that locate Russian drones by sound, even at altitudes radar cannot see, to provide a high-fidelity picture of incoming threats. It also has its own battle-management software systems that direct unmanned surveillance, as well as the Unmanned Services Force, an entirely new military service—alongside the army, navy, and air force—that is dedicated to drone warfare, with its own doctrine, leader development, procurement processes, and even recruiting and basic training. Perhaps most critically, the ecosystem in Ukraine also includes manufacturers that can produce enormous quantities of unmanned systems and constantly refine the software and hardware of those systems in response to developments on the battlefield.
The risk of missing this wider lesson is especially acute for Taiwan, which also faces the threat of invasion by a larger aggressor. Taiwan’s leaders and partners frequently say that the island is intently focused on understanding the nature of modern warfare, especially what is happening in Ukraine, in order to prepare for and thus deter Chinese aggression. But while Ukraine’s achievements are admired in Taiwan, that admiration has not yet produced the enormous, fundamental changes that enabled Ukraine’s success.
Indeed, it is not yet clear that Taiwan’s leaders fully understand the Ukraine lesson. Despite the current administration’s stated ambition to eventually field tens of thousands of aerial drones and well over a thousand uncrewed surface vessels, Taiwan’s legislature struck domestic drone production from the government’s special defense budget earlier this year. The opposition parties that control the legislature cited fiscal discipline as well as concerns about potential corruption in domestic procurement, but the move’s overall effect was to dramatically reduce new domestic procurement of unmanned systems and to cut funds set aside for joint development of such systems with the United States.
Even if Taiwan’s politicians can one day muster the funding for substantial quantities of drones, the island still remains far from making the considerable institutional changes needed to ensure their effective employment. The gap between admiring Ukraine’s success and replicating it, in other words, is precisely the gap Taiwan has yet to close.
HOW UKRAINE REWROTE THE RULES
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine sank its own flagship (lest it be seized by Russia) and was left, in effect, without a navy. Yet within two years, Ukraine had driven the Russian Black Sea Fleet from Sevastopol, sunk over one-third of Russia’s ships on the Black Sea, and forced the remainder of the fleet to tie up in a port as far from Ukraine as possible. Ukraine accomplished this not by acquiring traditional ships but by devising a means of contesting the sea without them: using aerial drones to find the Russian ships and maritime drones to sink them.
That experience—and Ukraine’s similar experiences with aerial and ground drones of various types, ranges, and capabilities—illustrates the most profound lesson of the war: that an overall architecture that links sensors with analysts, leaders, and shooters can enable remotely operated surveillance and weapons systems to work at scale. To build this architecture, Ukraine turned command and control into a software problem. Ukrainian software engineers and technologists, and the foreign volunteers supporting them, produced the Delta system, their own battle-management system, rather than purchasing one from elsewhere. Now run by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, the Delta system gathers data from sensors on the ground, at sea, and in the air and then distributes the resulting high-fidelity picture to Ukrainian military units. It is the connective tissue that allows a mass of cheap systems to be directed against a smaller and far costlier array of traditional weapons.
Ukraine also overcame enormous manpower and economic disadvantages by adapting its defenses. When Russia started using relatively inexpensive Shahed drones against it, Ukraine knew it could not defend itself with costly missile interceptors. American-made Patriot interceptors, for instance, cost several million dollars; Shaheds cost less than $50,000. Ukraine reversed this ratio by developing interceptor drones that cost only a few thousand dollars apiece. The Shaheds thus went from being relatively cheap to being relatively expensive.
The particular figures matter less than the principle they illustrate: that the relative cost of each engagement is itself a strategic variable, and it may be turned to the defender’s advantage by invention and production rather than by purchase. One of Ukraine’s greatest advantages in its war with Russia has been the speed of its adaptation, which has been enabled by embedding engineers with the units they support and equip. Ukrainian manufacturers, meanwhile, have demonstrated extraordinary flexibility, often making software changes to systems every week or two and hardware changes every three or four weeks. (This year, Ukraine is expected to produce a staggering seven million missiles and drones.) The result is that improved designs are delivered to the field well before the enemy can adjust. Ukraine, in other words, has compressed into weeks a cycle that takes years in traditional procurement processes.
THE PROCUREMENT REFLEX
Taiwan, by contrast, has treated its defense as something to be supplied rather than constructed. For more than three decades—going back at least to its purchase of F-16 fighters in 1992—it has invested in traditional manned platforms that are guided by someone else’s military doctrine. This instinct is natural enough; such systems have anchored every modern force, and the United States, Taiwan’s guarantor and weapons provider for decades, has built its own forces around them. But this has left Taipei with an establishment that knows how to buy things and is fluent in U.S. doctrines, but that does not know how to develop systems and is unable to articulate its own beliefs about strategy.
The consequences are visible throughout Taiwan’s force, which still prioritizes the acquisition of expensive manned platforms. The same pared-down special budget that eliminated domestic drone production, for instance, preserved billions of dollars for purchases of U.S. weapons systems. Taiwan’s military has also not yet settled on a new doctrine for defense and deterrence that recognizes the contributions that unmanned systems could make. This has enormous downstream effects since the military’s organizational structures (such as a dedicated unmanned-systems service), training, leader education, procurement, personnel policies, and facilities won’t be updated to effectively field unmanned systems—or to train forces in their employment.
Taiwan’s engineers, among the most capable in the world, also seem to be on the sidelines. The modern force must be able to contest the entire electromagnetic spectrum—from radio waves to infrared light—by building electronic-warfare capabilities, such as jamming and counter-drone defenses, while also preserving one’s own data links. But there are no signs that Taiwan’s engineers have been enlisted to confront this challenge. In Ukraine, Sky Fortress and the Delta system alike began as volunteer engineering projects that the military then adopted. Taiwan has produced no counterpart—no comparable channel through which its world-class commercial engineers contribute to defense solutions—and its drone manufacturers complain publicly that they don’t see clear demand from the government. If Taipei signaled that it understood the requirements of contemporary warfare, it would catalyze crucial changes in Taiwan’s formidable industrial base. Instead, at the very moment China is producing drones by the millions, Taiwan’s legislature withdrew the funding on which any serious scaling depends. Manufacturers cannot build mass for a customer that has not committed to buying their products, and foreign partners will take their collaboration only to markets that can demonstrate real demand.
Geography makes these deficiencies particularly worrisome. As an island, Taiwan is overly dependent on maritime imports that can be disrupted or blocked once fighting begins. Whatever Taiwan needs to have in a crisis, it must possess before the crisis begins. The island imports its energy and, at times, has held only weeks of reserves. It has also already seen maritime “accidents” sever the Internet cables that bind it to the world. Taiwan, in other words, cannot assume the luxury of choosing the war for which it prepares. Its readiness is a matter of organization and capacity, not merely of procurement.
TRANSLATION, NOT IMITATION
The lessons of Ukraine cannot, of course, be transferred to Taiwan unaltered. Ukraine contests terrain along a continuous front that is close to 1,000 miles long and has considerable depth to retreat, when needed. Taiwan, by contrast, would have to contest a strait and endure an aerial and missile campaign directed at a homeland that features no room for withdrawal. The task before Taipei is therefore not imitation but translation: the recasting of Ukrainian innovation for a theater more maritime and more exposed to the air.
Of the lessons from Ukraine, neutralizing the aggressor’s navy is at once the most readily applicable and the most in need of adaptation for Taiwan. Indeed, this is Taiwan’s greatest opportunity: a mass of distributed, expendable, unmanned maritime systems, on the surface and beneath it, cued by aerial drones overhead, that could be capable of denying an invasion fleet the freedom to operate. To be sure, the waters of the strait are not those of the Black Sea. Taiwan’s application would demand designs that are suited to a harsher sea and a challenging coastline, as well as the persistent surveillance required to direct such a force and production at a scale and price that would allow Taiwan to absorb considerable attrition.
Taiwan also requires a counterpart to Ukraine’s Delta system, conceived and sustained by Taiwanese hands, rather than licensed from abroad, and trained on data drawn from Taiwan’s own circumstances rather than Ukraine’s. What must be reproduced is not a specific system but the manner of its making: the close and continuous collaboration of operators, engineers, and analysts, as well as granting authority to those nearest the problem to constantly refine the solutions.
Taiwan’s potential adversary has drones, the largest conventional missile force in existence, and the world’s largest manufacturing capacity. For that reason, Taipei cannot rely on a modest stock of scarce and costly interceptors—though it will need substantial numbers of those for the missile threat. It must also field defenses that are affordable, layered, resilient, and abundant, and it must manufacture and accumulate them well in advance of any crisis. Such defenses would look much like Ukraine’s: dense networks of passive sensors to detect and track incoming systems; electronic warfare to jam and confuse them; interceptor drones of all types, produced locally and in volume, to destroy them; and the training pipelines and doctrine, continually updated, to knit these layers together.
TAIWAN’S CHOICE
Ukraine’s tempo of adaptation is the result of constant contact with a living and evolving enemy. Taiwan, rightly focused on deterrence, has no such instructor and cannot conjure one. What it can do is approximate the conditions—through exercises rigorous and unscripted enough to expose real issues, through the placement of its engineers with its operators rather than apart from them, and through the disciplined study of the Ukrainian experience.
Taiwan still has time to build the architecture that will deter Chinese aggression. It likely does not, however, have the time to purchase its way to safety, especially given the pace of deliveries from its major suppliers. (Only in April did Taipei receive the last of the 108 U.S. M1 tanks it ordered back in 2019.) The choice before Taipei, therefore—and, to a considerable degree, before those countries that have an interest in Taiwan’s ability to defend itself—is whether to persist in acquiring modest numbers of expensive but increasingly vulnerable manned platforms or to undertake the harder work of building expendable mass at home and the architecture to enable it. Other countries may assist in that task, but they cannot perform it. The deterrence posture of Taiwan is, in the end, Taiwan’s to sustain. And the principal lesson of the war in Ukraine is that a nation determined to survive must be willing to learn how to defend itself.
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