Anti-landing spikes on the beach of Kinmen, Taiwan. By Richie Chan @ Shutterstock.com
At the Cato Institute, Eric Gomez suggests that Taiwan should adopt an asymmetric porcupine defense against the possibility of invasion by China, rather than building up its conventional forces. He writes:
Taiwan must prevail in two military operations that will occur in the early stages of a potential conflict: surviving China’s conventional bombardment and denying the first wave of ground forces a foothold. Even if the United States intervenes, Taiwan would be fighting these operations largely on its own given how quickly they will likely occur. Moreover, success or failure in these operations has an outsize impact on Taiwan’s prospects for the rest of the conflict.
The best way for Taiwan to prevail in these two operations is to fully embrace an asymmetric defense strategy, commonly known as a “porcupine” strategy. Taiwan would have to reduce its current dependence on traditional military capabilities which are more flexible but also more vulnerable to China’s stronger military and therefore unlikely to survive long in a conflict.
An asymmetric defense strategy would reduce Taiwan’s ability to respond to China’s day‐to‐day coercive military activities. But it would improve Taiwan’s prospects against the most dangerous threat to its survival, an amphibious invasion.
To aid Taiwan’s shift to asymmetric defense while buying time for the transformation, I propose three security assistance policy adjustments and two assurances to China.
For security assistance, first, the United States should sell more asymmetric weapons to Taiwan, refuse to sell new traditional capabilities, and make arms sales contingent on greater Taiwanese defense spending.
Second, the US military should focus joint training with Taiwan’s military on improving small unit performance while avoiding larger‐scale exercises that focus on US‐Taiwan interoperability.
Third, Washington and Taipei should pursue opportunities for Taiwan’s defense industries to manufacture US‐designed weapons in order to help clear a $19 billion arms sales backlog.
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