Taiwan’s military says it wants to have enough attack drones and a strong, independent supply chain to defend against a possible attack from China.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Taiwan's military says having enough attack drones and a strong independent supply chain
00:05is essential to the country's defense plan.
00:08The local news outlet, the Liberty Times, has cited military sources as saying they
00:12plan to leverage drones to create what U.S. officials have described as a hellscape in
00:17the Taiwan Strait.
00:19This would involve using large numbers of uncrewed systems to deter a Chinese invasion.
00:24Taiwan says it plans to greatly increase mass production of two types of domestically-made
00:28attack drones.
00:29One is the Jianxiang, a loitering munition with a range of over 1,000 kilometers.
00:33The other is a short-range loitering munition designed to circle the battlefield before
00:38striking its target.
00:42For more on this so-called drone hellscape and how Taiwan is boosting its drone strategy,
00:47Han Meokan spoke to Kelly Greco, security analyst at the Stimson Center based in Washington,
00:52D.C.
00:53We're seeing now this pretty big push from Taiwan to develop drones and produce these
00:58systems at a pretty large scale.
00:59What does that tell you about how Taiwan views its defense strategy?
01:03It tells me two things, really.
01:06One is that Taiwan is paying attention to lessons of the Ukraine war and realizing that mass,
01:11meaning superior numbers, is really critical on the modern battlefield.
01:15And so the idea of being able to mass produce these is exactly right in terms of where the
01:20character war is going.
01:21The other thing it tells me is that the United States and Taiwan are both coming closer to
01:26being on the same page about what a future fight could potentially look like because the United States
01:31is talking about a hellscape as a way to try to deter China and defend in a contingency.
01:38And it looks like Taiwan is slowly moving more in that direction as well, recognizing that at least
01:43for an early part of a fight, that's going to be a critical part of it.
01:47So far, we've seen a lot of work on drones that operate in the air.
01:50But when it comes to this hellscape strategy that many people are talking about, what does that mean for Taiwan?
01:57Does this mean that we need different kinds of drones or unmanned systems?
02:00This is the right idea and that we need different types of drones.
02:04They do different things and ranges becomes really important.
02:08So the longer range ones would allow potentially to threaten to destroy a target much further away from Taiwan's soil itself.
02:16So this could be, say, ships that are leaving a harbor, for example, to try to disrupt operations before they really get underway.
02:24And really, when you look at the hellscape concept, it is multi-domain.
02:27So it is about, yes, you want to have air-based drones that are operating in the air that create all these kinds of problems for an adversary.
02:35But you would want to have surface drones and also subsurface drones.
02:38And so it's really that whole combination.
02:40You imagine if you were facing that kind of threat environment, how complex it is about knowing where to defend, where to look for the adversary.
02:47And anything that adds to that complexity makes operations really, really difficult for anyone that's going to try to dare to go on offense.
02:54And that's exactly the idea here with hellscape.
02:57So now that Taiwan is mass-producing these kinds of systems at a large scale, what's the next step for the military to improve on this drone strategy?
03:06I would say that if you're looking about what are the things that can be done in the short term that would actually have really large payoffs in terms of strengthening deterrence and defense, those are the things that I would focus on.
03:19And I think some of that would be about things at the lower end that can actually really complicate an adversary's ability to operate, especially things that you could very quickly get into production and then be able to scale up rapidly.
03:31So things that are at the higher end, it's going to take longer to be able to develop those and then scale them up.
03:36So I would be focusing on sort of the low to medium end to really try to create a robust deterrent in defense.
03:41Robust deterrent in defense.
03:42Robust deterrent in defense.
03:43Robust deterrent in defense.