Amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and the armed conflict in the Middle East (involving Israel), there is another dark cloud looming over the South China Sea region. China will launch a full-scale invasion against its island neighbour, a piece of land which Beijing claims as its own.
Chinese military incursions into Taiwan’s Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) have become a new normal, and so have the island nation’s live missile fire drills. An independent Taiwan is crucial for the stability of the existing global order (more importantly for American interests). The First Island Chain, running from Japan through Taiwan, the Philippines and as far as Indonesia forms an important part of the American foreign doctrine.
Beijing will want to annex Taiwan without a shot being fired, given the island nation’s economic and technological importance (especially the semiconductor ecosystem that powers the West’s growth engine). If China completes the annexation, it also gives the Xi Jinping administration an open pass to the Western Pacific, the US backyard, thereby potentially paving the way for a direct (and a massive) confrontation between the world’s first and second biggest economies.
So, the stakes are very high for Washington here and defending Taiwan won’t be an easy task against an enemy which has almost matched the US in the last few years, in terms of military preparedness. And the job is likely to get more difficult, as a report from the US-based think tank RAND Corp suggests that Several of America’s biggest allies are unlikely to commit troops to save Taiwan, either because they lack the military capability or don’t want to risk all-out war with an increasingly formidable China.
US’ hellscape theory
China currently possesses every 21st century military marvel like fifth-generation fighter jets, hypersonic missiles, sophisticated drones and most importantly, an expanding aircraft carrier fleet. Also, Beijing is steadily making giant strides in the domain of cyber and space warfare as well.
Speaking to The Washington Post on the sidelines of the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ annual Shangri-La Dialogue in June 2024, US Indo-Pacific Command chief Navy Admiral Samuel Paparo described the Pentagon’s contingency plan for Taiwan: Flooding the narrow Strait with swarms of thousands of drones, by land, sea, and air, to delay a Chinese attack enough for the US and its allies to muster additional military assets in the region.
Cheap, easily weaponizable drones have transformed battlefields from Ukraine to the Middle East since 2022, and the US military is rapidly adapting to this new uncrewed future. While both Washington and Beijing have a growing arsenal of sophisticated MALE (Medium-Altitude Long Endurance) and HALE (High-Altitude Long Endurance) drones, in contested airspace, these assets become vulnerable to strikedowns by surface-to-air missiles. AI-powered drone swarms, on the other hand, function like normal drones during recce mode but transform into a cruise missiles and launch suicide attacks when they receive the order. They can be launched from trucks or helicopters, after which they carry out coordinated reconnaissance, distributed surveillance and saturated strikes over ground targets.
Great wall of drones
According to a June 2024 analysis from the Centre for Strategic & International Studies, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) now boasts the largest maritime force on the planet, with 234 warships to the US Navy’s fleet of 219. The PLA Air Force (PLAAF) also now allegedly has the largest number of warplanes among all the global powers.
China has been the leading exporter of armed combat drones around the world over the past decade (along with Turkey), according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). And when it comes to the consumer drones that are converted into weapons of war by soldiers on the front lines, Chinese drone giant Da-Jiang Innovations controls three-quarters of that market, according to The Wall Street Journal. While the US and China may appear locked in a military drone arms race, the latter currently possess a significant advantage.
“China has essentially copied all of the large and medium high-altitude drones the US has and produced what amount to cheaper versions of the MQ-9 Reaper or the [RQ-4] Global Hawk,” Stacie Pettyjohn, senior fellow and director of defence programmes at the Centre for a New American Security, told the WIRED.
“Potentially more concerning is the smaller drones that don’t have to fly as far and can be launched from mainland China, of which the Chinese military has many,” she stated further.
“Simply put, China has a lot of drones and can make a lot more drones quickly, creating a likely advantage during a protracted conflict. This stands in contrast to American and Taiwanese forces, who do not have large inventories of drones or the right mix of drones to successfully defeat a Chinese invasion,” Pettyjohn and her co-authors wrote in the CNAS report.
Apart from beefing up Taiwan’s counter-drone defences, the Pentagon’s “hellscape” plan proposes that Uncle Sam’s military makes up for this growing gap by producing and deploying what amounts to a massive screen of autonomous drone swarms designed to confound enemy aircraft, provide guidance and targeting to allied missiles, knock out surface warships and landing craft, and generally create enough chaos to blunt a Chinese push across the Taiwan Strait.
Networked drones will not just strike adversaries but also provide critical intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance functions to fill the gaps between satellite imaging and crewed overflights, ostensibly allowing the United States and its allies to develop a more complete picture of the battlefield as it evolves.
The concept of Taiwan using densely layered defences to inflict incredibly high losses on an invading Chinese force isn’t a new one, with past visions of a “porcupine strategy” built on missiles and mines as deterrents to an outright invasion. However, the incorporation of massive drone fleets adds a new layer to the fight. And the scenario has been validated through the war games conducted by the US Air Force and defence think tanks like Rand over the past several years.
The CNAS report has also taken note of the developments happening in Ukraine, where the latter’s military has successfully deployed drones against the superiorly numbered and equipped Russian force to disrupt enemy formations, destroy armoured vehicles, and even neutralise surface combatants.
In the Black Sea, Ukrainian forces have managed to destroy 26 Russian vessels and forced Moscow’s decorated Black Sea Fleet to a safe harbour hundreds of miles away using missiles, kamikaze UAVs, and explosive-laden drone boats.
The CNAS report recommends the Pentagon to build a “diverse” fleet of UAVs encompassing “a mix of higher-end and cheaper systems” (the large and expensive Reaper versus low-cost single-use kamikaze drones), along with options like investing in the development of autonomous drone boats for attacking larger surface warships, and pre-positioning short- and medium-range drones on Taiwan for a rapid, immediate response to a Chinese invasion.
Assessing Pentagon’s response
In August 2023, United States Deputy Secretary of Defence Kathleen Hicks announced the department’s new “Replicator Initiative,” designed to build and field “attritable autonomous systems” (disposable AI-enabled drones) “at scale of multiple thousands, in multiple domains” within the next 18 to 24 months. As of March 2024, the Pentagon had earmarked $1 billion across its current fiscal year and 2025 budgets for the first round of Replicator systems. It also recently announced its first tranche of fresh capabilities, which includes the accelerated fielding of more than 1,000 of defence contractor AeroVironment’s Switchblade-600 loitering munitions, along with the procurement of uncrewed “interceptor” surface vessels under the department’s new Production-Ready, Inexpensive, Maritime Expeditionary (Prime) effort.
The Prime drone boats will purportedly be capable of “autonomously transiting hundreds of miles through contested waterspace, loitering in an assigned operating area while monitoring for maritime surface threats, and then sprinting to interdict a non-cooperative, manoeuvring vessel.”
The first Replicator systems were already deployed to the Indo-Pacific, according to Hicks, with some military units training with cheap drones produced under the initiative as of August 2024.
The US Army, on its part, has asked for a $120.6 million budget request for Low Altitude Stalking and Strike Ordnance (Lasso) semiautonomous loitering munitions to outfit infantry brigade combat teams with the capability. As of April 2024, the Marine Corps has selected three defence contractors to compete for a potential $249 million contract to furnish Marines with so-called Organic Precision Fires-Light kamikaze drone swarms.
US Special Operations Command, an early adopter of loitering munitions, now seeking to outfit its fleet of aircraft with air-launched systems. The Marine Corps, on the other hand, has been experimenting with uncrewed surface vessels bristling with Uvision Hero-120 kamikaze drone launchers, while the Navy has been eyeing missile-hauling drone boats as potential escorts for transport ships.
The US is also working to bolster Taiwan’s own drone capabilities. In June 2024, a $360 million weapons sale to Taipei was approved that included 291 ALTIUS 600M-V kamikaze drones produced by Anduril and 720 Switchblade-300 loitering munitions.
The Taiwanese government plans to procure nearly 1,000 additional AI-enabled attack drones in 2025, according to the Taipei Times, with long-standing plans to expand indigenous production of homegrown capabilities to prevent backlogs in weapons transfers from the United States, and, more importantly, ease reliance on Chinese-made commercial off-the-shelf parts.
The challenge called mass-producing
An April 2023 assessment from the Rand Corporation indicated that rising demand for weaponized drones would likely “strain” the capacity of the existing US defence industrial base.
Another CNAS report from June 2023 argued that the Ukraine war (and the US government’s role as a major provider of security assistance to Kyiv) has “shed light on serious deficiencies” in the Pentagon’s ability to rapidly scale production of “key weapons” like precision-guided munitions compared to Russia, a problem echoed in the most recent CNAS report’s assessment of the Pentagon’s approach to Taiwan’s defence.
“Ukraine consistently has pioneered new approaches to drone warfare, but Russia has rapidly adapted and scaled drone production in a way that Ukraine cannot match. Technological and tactical innovations are necessary but not sufficient. Mass production of an affordable mix of drones is also needed to support a large and likely protracted conflict,” the June 2024 CNAS report stated.
China too has enabled the country’s defence industrial base to rapidly accelerate weapons R&D and production, so far that Beijing is “heavily investing in munitions and acquiring high-end weapons systems and equipment five to six times faster than the United States,” as a March 2024 comparison from CSIS put it. By contrast, the US defence industrial ecosystem has over the past several decades consolidated into a handful of “large” contractors like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, a development that threatens to not only stifle innovation but hamstring the production of critical systems needed for the next big war.
The latest CNAS report also recommends that the Pentagon and US Congress work to foster both the commercial and military drone industrial base “to scale production and create surge capacity” to quickly replace drones lost in a future conflict. While the Pentagon has, with regards to Ukraine, relied on multi-year and large-lot procurement programmes to source munitions from large “primes,” apart from providing the industry with the stability it needs to expand production capacity, as mentioned in the 2023 CNAS report, the Replicator initiative is explicitly designed to not only further provide that stability to drone makers but also to pull in “non-traditional” defence industry players, start-ups like Anduril or drone boat maker Saronic, the latter of which recently received $175 million in Series B funding to scale up its manufacturing capacity.
“It comes down to contracts. Where Replicator is potentially most impactful is where the Pentagon buys something they keep for a few years before they get something new for a different mission set so the DOD isn’t keeping a system in their inventory for decades. Establishing those practices, getting those contracts out there, and getting enough money into it so there’s competition and resiliency within the industry is really needed to fuel innovation and provide the capabilities that are needed,” Pettyjohn concluded.
The plans of the Pentagon and its Taiwanese partners to welcome the invading Chinese task force with lethal drone swarms look pretty impressive on paper. However, given the nature of Chinese military build-ups (both resource and troop-wise), Washington and Taipei need to ensure they have an ultra-massive stockpile of loitering munitions and most importantly, a steady production line, which can quickly produce this hardware during wartime.
Can the United States and Taiwan live up to the above challenge? One will have to wait and see what transcends in the next few years.