In the span of just a few years, drones have become instrumental in warfare. Conflicts in Ukraine, Iran, Nagorno-Karabakh, Sudan, and elsewhere have shown how autonomous vehicles have become a quintessential part of modern combat.
It’s a fact that Taiwan knows all too well. The island nation, fearing imminent invasion from China, has both the need, know-how, and industry necessary to build a robust and advanced drone program.
Yet Taiwan, which has set an ambitious target of producing 180,000 drones per year by 2028, is struggling to create this industry from scratch. Last year, it produced fewer than 10,000.
“Taiwan definitely has the ability to make the best drones in the world,” says Cathy Fang, a policy analyst at the Research Institute for Democracy, Society, and Emerging Technology (DSET).
So why doesn’t it?
Designing a Hellscape
Fang and her colleagues published a lengthy report on June 16 that reveals just how sluggish Taiwan’s drone industry has been. According to their research, the country has produced between 8,000 and 10,000 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) over the past year, with “structural challenges” standing in the way of the current rate and the ambitious goal. Their study found that Taiwan’s drone production has been stymied by “high manufacturing costs, low domestic procurement, and minimal foreign government orders.”
Fang and other DSET researchers briefed WIRED on the details of their report in their Taipei offices in May.
Taiwan has lived under the threat of Chinese invasion for decades, but recent years have turned it into a more immediate possibility. Beijing has made clear that it intends to complete its aggressive modernization of the People’s Liberation Army by 2027; Taiwanese officials say invasion could come that early but almost certainly before Premier Xi Jinping’s current term in office ends in 2029.
While there are competing views about what form, exactly, Chinese military aggression could take, military analysts in Taiwan fear it could be a full combined arms onslaught: From air and sea at first, followed by a full land invasion.
That means Taiwan has an imperative to come up with innovative solutions to defend itself, and fast. As one American commander remarked in 2023, Taiwan’s self-defense will mean turning the Taiwan Strait into a “hellscape”—bombarding incoming Chinese ships and planes with swarms of uncrewed aerial and naval vehicles. This strategy doesn’t need to destroy the considerable Chinese navy and air force outright, but it does need to frustrate Beijing’s advances long enough for Taiwan’s allies to rally to its defense.
Taipei is already doing some of this right. In 2022, the government launched the Drone National Team, a program meant to match government and industry to scale up the nascent field. In particular, the team was dispatched to learn lessons from Ukraine, whose defensive strategy has relied heavily on small, tactical, cheap UAVs capable of carrying out multiple missions and integrating closely with ground units. Today, the country boasts a massive domestic drone industry, with Kyiv planning to buy 4.5 million small drones this year, on top of its long-range uncrewed missile program, its autonomous land vehicles, and its uncrewed naval drones.