Will Taiwan Fight?
The porcupine strategy for Taiwan is sound. The harder question is whether Taiwan will use it — and what the answer means for American commitments.
Author’s note: It’s been over a month since I last posted; I am sorry about that. Regular listeners to Net Assessment will know that I’ve been a little (ahem!) busy, including moving my son west, then moving myself east. The good news is that we are now getting settled back in Northern Virginia, so I’m hoping to get back on a consistent writing schedule.
But, truth be told, we’re all busy. The other reason for the delay is that I’m still getting the hang of this AI thing. What follows below is, by now, mostly me; and the original AI version was based on my remarks on the show, so it was always partly me. But Claude is now spitting out content that is so good that I have to work harder to make it more “me” than “it.”
I’ve never hidden what this Substack is — it’s in the title. But if I’m going to use this thing as intended, I need to have a better (and faster) system for turning podcast into text.
On a recent episode of Net Assessment, we discussed Stacie Pettyjohn and Molly Campbell’s article “Hellscape Taiwan: A Porcupine Defense in the Drone Age” in War on the Rocks, adapted from a longer study published at CNAS. The article builds on the layered asymmetric defense concept that Admiral Samuel Paparo, the Indo-Pacific commander, has called the “hellscape” — essentially four overlapping layers of drones, uncrewed surface and underwater vessels, first-person-view systems, and other short-range capabilities that would make any Chinese amphibious assault on the island extraordinarily costly.
The logic is sound. Taiwan’s geography genuinely favors the defender. The near seas, the landing zones, the mountainous interior — all of it can be leveraged in ways that make a direct assault a nightmare for the attacker.
And yet such a strategy has been discussed publicly for at least two decades, and Taiwan has still not fully implemented it. That, to me, is the puzzle — not what the right strategy is, but why it hasn’t been adopted.
Some of the answer is political. The Legislative Yuan has pushed back on President Lai Ching-te’s requested defense spending increases, prompting angry rebukes from U.S. politicians and the Trump administration. There is even a faction in Taiwanese politics that prefers accommodation with Beijing over confrontation. Literally as we were recording, Cheng Li-wun, the leader of the KMT opposition party, was on her way to Beijing.
But the more significant unknown runs deeper than legislative infighting over a defense budget. Two pieces — one in the Washington Post, the other at CNN — asked whether the Taiwanese will actually fight. A not-insignificant number of the island’s occupants are already working on their exit plans rather than their resistance plans.
Such doubts about Taiwanese resolve are hardly universal, however. Others, including Raymond Kuo and Catherine Kish, last year argued that the Taiwanese will in fact fight, and fight hard, to defeat a Chinese invasion. I take their assessment seriously. But the truth is that we cannot know what would actually happen should war come. And that uncertainty should factor into how we think about American commitments.
The layered hellscape that Pettyjohn and Campbell describe requires Taiwanese forces to stand their ground under fire, to operate drones and uncrewed surface vessels in the middle of an active invasion, to sustain casualties and keep fighting. That requires not just hardware but will — and will is not something you can buy or mandate through legislation.
I also worry about a related dynamic that I think doesn’t get enough attention. Taiwan, like a lot of U.S. allies, may be making decisions less on the basis of what is actually in its strategic interest and more on the basis of what it thinks will keep the United States committed to its defense. There is a logic to this. Taiwan has very few formal friends in the world. Almost no country diplomatically recognizes it. It knows that American support is the central variable in its security equation. So it tries to do the things Washington asks — buy the weapons, show the resolve, signal seriousness — in the hope that the relationship holds.
This is a perilous way to run a defense strategy. The examples of the Trump administration’s unpredictability when it comes to U.S. “commitments” are too numerous to mention. In the case of Taiwan, specifically, Trump has said, at various points, that Taiwan stole America’s chip industry, that he resents Taiwan for what he claims are unfair trade practices, and he has left open the question of what he might do in the event of a Chinese attack. In short, Taipei might believe that it is doing all the right things to satisfy the Trump administration’s demands, and still discover – too late – that U.S. help isn’t forthcoming. Polls in Taiwan reflect these doubts.
Americans, meanwhile, are ambivalent. A poll released late last year found that just 43 percent supported sending U.S. troops to Taiwan in the event of a war; 51 percent were opposed. Now, the Iran war has consumed political bandwidth, military resources, and public attention – and reminded us all of the limits of military power. Even weak states are capable of resisting American coercion. Just imagine what would happen in a war with nuclear-armed China. (This cuts both ways: China would be foolish to believe that conquering Taiwan would be easy after watching Russia fumble around for over four years in Ukraine, and now the United States’ frustrations vis-à-vis Iran.)
Another challenge: China might attempt other means short of war to achieve its objectives. As Zack Cooper noted on the show, a Chinese blockade of Taiwan would be particularly problematic. The porcupine or hellscape strategy is designed to deter or defeat a large-scale amphibious invasion. But China need not attempt such a thing. A blockade — cutting off Taiwan’s energy and food imports, squeezing the island economically, and waiting — might be a wiser strategy, especially if Taiwan is successful at building up the asymmetric capabilities that make a direct assault so expensive. In short, making an invasion more costly may simply result in different forms of coercion.
Breaking a blockade is a different kind of operation, as we are now witnessing in the Persian Gulf. It would almost certainly require the United States to act, because Taiwan’s navy cannot compete with the PLA-N, and Taiwan needs resupply from the sea to survive. And here is the uncomfortable part: in that scenario, the United States would almost certainly be the one firing on the Chinese ships. In other words, in the eyes of many, the United States would be seen as having fired the first shot in the Taiwan war. Whether that is technically accurate from the perspective of international law or strategic logic is beside the point.
So where does this leave us? I think the porcupine strategy is the right framework for Taiwan’s defense, and I think Pettyjohn and Campbell have done valuable work spelling out what it looks like in the drone age. But strategy and implementation are different things. Taiwan needs to move faster, invest more, and build the indigenous production capacity that would allow it to sustain losses and keep fighting — not just to deter an invasion on day one, but to continue resisting for an extended period of time.
And this ultimately hinges not on what Americans can or will do, but on what Taiwanese can and will do. The will to resist is not a detail. It is the whole thing. Without it, all the drones and uncrewed vessels and layered defenses in the world are just expensive hardware waiting to be captured or destroyed.
The Taiwanese need to decide what they are willing to defend, and what price they are willing to pay to defend it. They can signal this before the first shot is fired through their politics, their budgets, and their training. If they make that decision clearly and credibly, the case for U.S. support becomes stronger. If they don’t, then Americans are being asked to take on a commitment that the intended beneficiary has declined to take seriously. And that is not a sound position on which to build a credible defense strategy.