30-Second Overview: The 2022 Russia-Ukraine war rewrote Taiwan's defense logic. In 2024, mandatory service was restored from four months back to one year. The 2025 Han Kuang 41 exercise ran for a record ten days and nine nights, mobilizing 20,000 reservists. In November 2025, the Lai administration proposed a NT$1.25 trillion special budget — including 200,000 drones. But most of that money still goes toward tanks, jets, and submarines. Former Chief of General Staff Lee Hsi-min gave a bitter laugh: "If a tank can be an asymmetric weapon, then what isn't?" Taiwan is trying to walk two contradictory defense roads at once. It wants to become a porcupine — but its body still remembers being a leopard.
At the Hukou armored training ground in October 2025, a row of M1A2T Abrams tanks sat on the concrete as President Lai Ching-te stepped down from the reviewing stand to preside over the unit's commissioning ceremony. The first batch of 38 had arrived in December 2024, a second batch of 42 in July 2025, with a final 28 to be delivered in the first quarter of 2026 — 108 total, deployed to the 584th Armored Brigade and the 269th Mechanized Brigade.[^1]
That same month, former Chief of General Staff Lee Hsi-min was signing copies of his book at a Taipei bookstore. When someone asked how he felt about the Ministry of Defense using "beach landing interdiction" to justify buying M1A2T tanks, he gave a bitter laugh: "All I can do is laugh. If a tank can be an asymmetric weapon, then what isn't?"[^2]
That sentence is the most honest key to understanding Taiwan's defense in 2026. The government talks porcupine strategy while signing contracts for America's most expensive weapons. It preaches defense autonomy while sending 76 percent of its defense budget abroad. It extends conscription while acknowledging that 200,000 drones are the real future combat force. These contradictions aren't oversights — they are the marks of an island pulled between two survival logics. It wants to become a porcupine, but its body still remembers being a leopard.
Why a Porcupine
The term "Porcupine Strategy" was coined in a 2008 paper by William Murray, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College. His argument was simple: Taiwan cannot win against the PLA in conventional warfare. Any warship worth billions, any expensive fighter jet, might survive only hours once a Taiwan Strait conflict begins. The only rational course is to buy large numbers of cheap, land-based mobile missiles, sea mines, and air defense systems — making Taiwan an island that would be "too costly to chew."[^3]
The concept wasn't immediately embraced in Taiwan. The man who turned it into formal military strategy was Lee Hsi-min. In 2017, while still serving as Chief of the General Staff, Lee completed an internal framework the military called the Overall Defense Concept (ODC). Its core was a single question: if the PLA actually attacked, how could Taiwan make itself indigestible? Lee's answer was sea mines, mobile missile vehicles, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, and large quantities of drones — cheap, numerous, concealable, shoot-and-scoot.[^4]
His logic matched Murray's: Taiwan doesn't need to win. It just needs to make the cost of invasion too high for anyone to gamble on.
But after Lee retired in 2019, ODC was quietly shelved. The Ministry of Defense continued buying more jets, more tanks, and pushed forward the indigenous submarine program. When journalists asked Lee how he felt, he said President Tsai Ing-wen was "the president I've seen who respects the military most" — but added a careful qualifier: "Does she understand ODC? I'm not sure, because different people might interpret it differently."[^5]
📝 Curator's Note
ODC's counterintuitive challenge was that it threatened the military's entire self-image. For career officers, fighter jets, warships, and tanks are the cultural pillars of service identity. Embracing drone swarms effectively means admitting that the army, navy, and air force all become secondary actors. ODC was shelved after Lee's retirement partly because of strategic disagreement, partly because of military institutional survival instinct.
Four Months to One Year
Taiwan's conscription policy is a barometer of the island's security anxiety.
In the 1950s, mandatory service lasted three years. At the Cold War's peak, Taiwan maintained a standing army of 600,000, and every man enlisted upon reaching adulthood. After the Cold War, service was gradually shortened. The 2000s brought a shift toward an all-volunteer force supplemented by conscripts, and by 2013, mandatory service had been cut to just four months — a stint military commentators mockingly called "summer camp."[^6]
The turning point came in February 2022, with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. A country everyone expected to fall in three days held on with drones, man-portable Stinger missiles, and whole-of-society mobilization — and within six months had driven Russian forces out of Kyiv. The resonance in Taiwan was difficult to overstate. Suddenly everyone was asking a question that had previously felt too uncomfortable to raise: what if it were us?
On December 27, 2022, President Tsai Ing-wen announced that mandatory service would be restored to one year, effective January 2024. She called it "a difficult but necessary decision." Monthly pay for conscripts was raised from roughly NT$6,500 to NT$26,307.[^7]
The new one-year curriculum was also overhauled: 8 weeks of basic training, 18 weeks at garrison, 7 weeks of specialization, 13 weeks of field exercises, and 6 weeks of joint operations drills. Riflemen fire no fewer than 800 live rounds. Compared to the old four-month regime — widely dismissed as "standing guard and sweeping floors" — this is a fundamental rebuild of the conscript force.
⚠️ Contested Viewpoint
Polls show over 70% support for the return of one-year service, but the reaction among young men actually facing conscription is more complicated. VOA interviews with several draft-age men found some admitting reluctance toward combat, others questioning whether a single year of training can produce genuinely combat-ready soldiers, and at least one saying directly: "I don't want to give my life for politicians' mistakes." Supporters argue it's the bare minimum for national defense; critics say even a year isn't enough. One-year conscription is both consensus and compromise — nobody is truly satisfied, but most accept it as the furthest the system can currently go.
The Hai Kun's 147 Days
For decades, Taiwan's arsenal depended almost entirely on U.S. arms sales. F-16 fighters, Patriot missiles, M1A2 tanks — virtually all major equipment came from Washington. This tied Taiwan's security to American political will: a change in the White House could change the pace and scope of weapons deliveries.
"Defense autonomy" thus became a long-term goal. The indigenous submarine program was its flagship.
On September 28, 2023, the first domestically built submarine, Hai Kun (hull number 711), was launched at CSBC Corporation's Kaohsiung shipyard. At 70 meters long with a displacement of roughly 2,500 tons and an X-form stern rudder, President Tsai Ing-wen stood at the ceremony and said: "History will remember this day." Seven more submarines of the same class were planned.[^9]
But history may remember that day differently from how she intended. The delivery timeline originally set for 2024 slipped. Sea trials did not begin until June 17, 2025 — starting with surface navigation tests, then shallow-water submersion, before eventually attempting deep-water diving. On November 28, 2025, the Hai Kun ended a 147-day dockside pause and put back to sea for renewed surface tests. Several critical milestones remained before formal commissioning.[^10]
When journalists asked Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng about the timeline, he gave an unusually candid answer for a senior military official: "Other countries building new indigenous submarines typically take seven years or more — some take sixteen. We originally set five years, which was overly optimistic. We failed to understand reality, and especially failed to account for our country's specific circumstances."[^11]
Chiu declined to set a delivery date. He said only: "The handover process will begin only when testing is fully complete and safety is confirmed."
✦ "History will remember this day." That was Tsai Ing-wen's exact words at the Hai Kun's launch on September 28, 2023. Two years later, the Hai Kun had yet to complete submersion testing. History will remember that day — just perhaps not in the way the speaker intended.
Between the "Strongest Tank" and the "Cheapest Drone"
In November 2025, the Lai Ching-te administration introduced the Special Act for Strengthening National Defense Resilience and Asymmetric Capabilities, proposing a NT$1.25 trillion special defense budget (roughly US$40 billion) over eight years. If passed, Taiwan's defense spending would rise from the current 2.5% of GDP to 3.3%. Of the total, approximately NT$950 billion (76%) would flow to American defense contractors for traditional weapons platforms.[^12]
The same budget's other half: over 200,000 drones of various types and more than a thousand unmanned vessels — multi-rotor reconnaissance drones, fixed-wing attack drones, loitering munitions. Approximately NT$300 billion is earmarked for domestic production, building what officials call a "non-red supply chain" — a defense industrial base that excludes Chinese components entirely.[^13]
Put these two halves side by side, and you have the paradox that prompted Lee Hsi-min's bitter laugh: porcupine strategy has been accepted in rhetoric, but the budget still tilts toward traditional large platforms.
Three NCSIST programs represent Taiwan's attempt to localize the "Ukraine experience":
- Chien Hsiang: An anti-radiation loitering munition that began mass production in 2023, with 104 units built for the Air Force over six years. It detects enemy air defense radar signals and dive-attacks at high speed — similar in concept to Israel's Harpy.[^14]
- Jui Ying II: A medium-to-long-range reconnaissance drone with a 12-meter wingspan, 300-kilometer control range, and 2,000-kilometer maximum range. A strike variant is under development.
- Teng Yun II: A MALE (Medium-Altitude Long-Endurance) drone using the same engine as the U.S. MQ-9B, capable of staying airborne for more than 20 hours. Not yet in mass production.
None of these are cheap, and none exist in large numbers. The real 200,000 will likely be smaller, cheaper units — some perhaps with 3D-printed airframes. On the Ukrainian battlefield, an FPV drone costing tens of thousands of NT dollars has destroyed tanks worth hundreds of millions. That equation has changed every modern military's calculus.
But the fate of the NT$1.25 trillion budget is not a strategic question — it's a political one. Since December 2, 2025, the opposition-controlled Legislative Yuan has blocked the special budget at least eight times. Opposition parties challenged the budgeting methodology and oversight mechanisms; the ruling party accused them of blocking the budget as blocking national defense. A visiting U.S. congressional delegation publicly urged the Legislature to pass it. Taiwan's representative in Washington rarely comments directly on domestic politics — but broke that norm to support passage.[^15]
This legislative standoff is Taiwan's third layer of defense contradiction: whether to spend this money, and how to spend it, is itself one of the most sensitive questions in cross-strait relations.
📝 Curator's Note
A defense budget is a mirror — it reflects not military strength, but political will. Countries with money to buy weapons are not rare. Countries willing to bear the political cost of buying weapons are. Taiwan is simultaneously both: wealthy and divided. The real stakes of the NT$1.25 trillion aren't what gets purchased — it's whether the purchase can survive domestic politics at all.
Black Bear Academy: Chen Shui-bian's Open Letter
The deepest shift in Taiwan's defense isn't in the weapons catalog. It's in the conversations happening in living rooms and coffee shops.
The Kuma Academy (黑熊學院, named after the Formosan black bear) is a civilian organization co-founded in 2021 by Shen Po-yang — a criminology professor at National Taipei University — and Ho Cheng-hui, a veteran civil defense researcher. Its focus is "whole-of-society defense" education. The basic camp runs four courses: debunking military misinformation with modern military science; media literacy and cognitive warfare; emergency first aid, wound packing, and casualty transport; and shelter and evacuation planning.[^16]
In 2022, semiconductor entrepreneur Robert Tsao announced a donation of NT$600 million to the Kuma Academy. On January 7, 2025, former President Chen Shui-bian publicly disclosed online that Tsao had followed through on this pledge, and revealed that the two had set a target of training three million "Kuma Warriors" within three years — roughly one-third of Taiwan's nine million households — with the goal of ensuring at least one person per household has basic civil defense knowledge.[^17]
Kuma Academy courses have sold out since their debut. A woman interviewed by CommonWealth magazine said: "I'm not here to fight. I just don't want to not know how to protect my kids if war comes." That line later became the Academy's own promotional copy.[^18]
✦ "I'm not here to fight. I just don't want to not know how to protect my kids if war comes." This is the most honest statement about Taiwan's defense consciousness in 2026. It isn't nationalism. It's the most primal family instinct.
The All-Out Defense Mobilization Readiness Act simultaneously established a reserve mobilization system. After 2022, reserve refresher training was expanded from five-day sessions to fourteen days, with a significant increase in rigor. Official estimates put the mobilizable reserve force at over two million — a number that, combined with 180,000 active-duty personnel, means the total theoretically deployable armed force in wartime approaches one-tenth of Taiwan's entire labor force.
Han Kuang 41: Ten Days of In-Depth Defense
At dawn on July 9, 2025, the Han Kuang 41 exercise launched simultaneously across Taiwan. Running for ten days and nine nights, it was the longest Han Kuang exercise since the series began in 1984. It mobilized 20,000 reservists — also a record.[^19]
The biggest difference from past Han Kuang exercises wasn't the scale — it was the script's mood. Past exercises tended to showcase military spectacle: tanks in formation, jets screaming overhead, naval vessels in convoy. Han Kuang 41's core assumption was harsh: Taiwan's military will have only partial air superiority in wartime and must be prepared to fight a protracted war.
The exercise ran in six phases:
- Days 1-3: PRC gray-zone harassment; Taiwan enters "routine crisis management." This was a lesson from Ukraine — war doesn't begin with tanks crossing a border. It begins with fishing vessel harassment, communications jamming, and disinformation floods.
- Day 4: Wartime deployment, repositioning forces and establishing positions.
- Days 5-10: Full combat, divided into four sub-phases: amphibious interdiction, coastal defense, in-depth defense, and protracted warfare.
The final three sub-phases — coastal defense, in-depth defense, and protracted warfare — were Han Kuang 41's genuine innovations. The exercise explicitly acknowledged that the standing military cannot hold the entire depth of the island. Reserve forces must be deployed to the second line, using conscript and reserve units to pin down attacking forces while the all-volunteer core finds openings to counterattack.
This is ODC's shadow. Lee Hsi-min's original vision was to turn Taiwan into a "net" — if the front can't hold, fall back into depth, and exact a cost from the enemy at every point of the retreat. Han Kuang 41 was the first time this concept was systematically written into an exercise scenario.[^20]
| 1995 Missile Crisis | 2026 |
|---|---|
| 600,000 active troops | 180,000 active + 2 million reserves |
| Two-year conscription | One-year conscription + volunteer core |
| Beach landing decisive battle doctrine | Gray zone → in-depth → protracted war |
| Weapons entirely from U.S. aid | U.S. aid primary + defense autonomy supplements |
| Battleships and big guns | Drones × mobile missiles × sea mines |
| Civil defense as exercise prop | Civil defense as Kuma Academy's operating reality |
160 Kilometers and One Bet
The Taiwan Strait is roughly 130 kilometers wide at its narrowest and 400 kilometers at its widest. In military terms, this body of water is a natural Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) barrier. To cross it, the PLA would need not just ships and aircraft, but sustained air and naval superiority over several consecutive weeks, plus full amphibious landing capability — something only two or three military forces in the world can achieve.[^21]
Taiwan's defense strategy rests on a cold calculus: it doesn't need to win — it just needs to hold out until the international community intervenes. A porcupine doesn't need to defeat the predator. It just needs to make the predator decide the meal isn't worth the pain. The M1A2T tank, the F-16V fighter, the Hai Kun submarine — their mission isn't to defeat the PLA. Their mission is to buy time. The 200,000 drones, the 20,000 reservists, and the three million Kuma Warriors are all doing the same thing.
But this calculus has a premise: that the international community will actually intervene.
The F-16V Block 70, originally scheduled for delivery in 2024, has slipped to 2027 or later due to U.S. supply chain and software issues.[^22] The Hai Kun has fallen more than two years behind its projected commissioning date. The NT$1.25 trillion special budget has been blocked in the Legislature eight times. The M1A2T tanks arrived on schedule — but they are precisely the kind of weapon Lee Hsi-min finds grimly ironic. Every timeline, every budget line, every weapons system is a reminder of the same thing: Taiwan's defense is not Taiwan's plan alone.
Further Reading
- Taiwan Strait Crises and Cross-Strait Relations — How three Taiwan Strait crises shaped the structural logic of today's military standoff
- Taiwan's Diplomatic Allies and International Relations — The other road beyond military self-reliance: Taiwan's diplomatic breakthrough in the international system
- Taiwan's Political Environment and Electoral System — Why the NT$1.25 trillion special budget has been blocked eight times in the Legislature: national defense is not decided by any single government
- Taiwan's Cybersecurity Industry — The front line of gray-zone warfare isn't sea mines — it's firewalls
- Taiwan's Space Industry — From civilian satellites to defense communications: space is the new frontier of Taiwan's defense resilience
References
[^1]: UDN: Generational Shift — M1A2T Tank Battalion Commissioned, Brave Tiger Transfers Combat Mission — President Lai's personal presiding over the first M1A2T battalion commissioning at Hukou in October 2025; full record of the first batch of 38 arriving December 2024, second batch of 42 arriving July 2025, and deployment to the 584th Armored Brigade and 269th Mechanized Brigade.
[^2]: China Times: ODC Overturned During His Tenure — Former Chief of General Staff Lee Hsi-min Speaks — Lee Hsi-min's original statement on the Ministry of Defense using "beach landing interdiction" to justify M1A2 tank purchases: "All I can do is laugh. If a tank can be an asymmetric weapon, then what isn't?" Key quote for understanding the gap between ODC and actual defense policy.
[^3]: Wikipedia: Porcupine Strategy — Proposed in 2008 by U.S. Naval War College professor William Murray, recommending Taiwan abandon traditional large weapons platforms in favor of land-based mobile missiles, sea mines, and other asymmetric capabilities.
[^4]: UDN Opinion: Lee Hsi-min and Lee Ai-jui — Explaining the Overall Defense Concept — Former Chief of General Staff Lee Hsi-min's personal explanation of ODC: replacing a small number of expensive large platforms with vast quantities of small, mobile, low-cost weapon systems to prevent the PLA from successfully invading or politically controlling Taiwan.
[^5]: Liberty Times: Tsai Ing-wen Supports ODC — Lee Hsi-min: "She's the Most Respectful of the Military" — Lee Hsi-min's assessment of Tsai's support for ODC in interviews, with his careful qualifier "does she understand ODC? I'm not sure" — reflecting continued resistance to ODC at the policy execution level.
[^6]: ETtoday: Military Service Extended for the First Time in 70 Years — From 3 Years to 4 Months to 1 Year — Taiwan's mandatory service from the 1950s three-year term to four months in 2013 to restoration of one year in 2024; includes historical background on the Cold War-era 600,000-strong standing army.
[^7]: CommonWealth CityLab: Everything About the Extended Conscription in One Look — Full details of President Tsai's December 27, 2022 press conference announcing the restoration of one-year service: monthly pay raised to NT$26,307, the 8+18+7+13+6-week training structure, and the 800-round live-fire requirement.
[^8]: VOA: Taiwan Restores One-Year Military Service; Young Men Have Mixed Feelings — Interviews with draft-age men on their complex reactions to restored one-year service, including reluctance toward combat, doubts about training quality, and the direct statement "I don't want to give my life for politicians' mistakes."
[^9]: Office of the President: First Indigenous Submarine Hai Kun Completed — Record of the Hai Kun's naming and launch ceremony at CSBC's Kaohsiung shipyard on September 28, 2023, including Tsai Ing-wen's "history will remember this day," the vessel's 70-meter length, 2,500-ton displacement, and plans for seven follow-on submarines.
[^10]: Newtalk: Hai Kun Completes Two Consecutive Days of Surface Navigation Tests, Closing in on Critical Submersion Milestone — Record of the Hai Kun's return to sea on November 28, 2025 after a 147-day dockside pause; explains the three-stage testing sequence of surface navigation, shallow submersion, and deep submersion, with the vessel still in initial verification.
[^11]: Epoch Times: Hai Kun Delivery Delayed — Defense Minister Admits Original Timeline "Too Optimistic" — Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng's testimony in the Legislative Yuan admitting the five-year construction timeline was "overly optimistic," comparing it to other countries' 7-to-16-year submarine construction cycles — one of the rare senior military officials to publicly acknowledge the program's timeline was unrealistic.
[^12]: Global Taiwan Institute: The Contents and Controversies of Taiwan's Special Defense Budget — Full analysis of the NT$1.25 trillion special budget: 2026–2033 eight-year timeline, GDP share rising to 3.3%, NT$950 billion (76%) flowing to U.S. defense contractors.
[^13]: TechNews: Ministry of Defense NT$1.25 Trillion Budget Confirms 200,000 Drones — Details of the procurement plan: over 200,000 drones of various types, over 1,000 unmanned vessels, NT$300 billion in domestic production, and the "non-red supply chain" concept.
[^14]: Liberty Times Defense: Growing MIT Drones — NCSIST to Release Teng Yun and Hung Chueh III Drone Technology — Current status of NCSIST's domestic drone programs: Chien Hsiang anti-radiation loitering munition (104 units over 6 years), Teng Yun II MALE drone, and Jui Ying II reconnaissance drone with 12-meter wingspan and 2,000-kilometer range.
[^15]: NPR: Taiwan President's Defense Plan Hits Gridlock as China Ramps Up Pressure — Full account of the political standoff around the NT$1.25 trillion special budget blocked at least eight times since December 2, 2025, including opposition party positions and the U.S. congressional delegation's public support.
[^16]: Wikipedia: Kuma Academy — The Kuma Academy was co-founded in 2021 by Shen Po-yang (criminology professor at National Taipei University) and Ho Cheng-hui (civil defense researcher); full description of the four-course basic camp curriculum.
[^17]: Liberty Times: Robert Tsao Funds NT$600 Million — Kuma Academy's Background Questioned, Shen Po-yang Responds with 1,000-Word Essay — Full account of Robert Tsao's 2022 NT$600 million donation pledge to the Kuma Academy, and former President Chen Shui-bian's January 7, 2025 public disclosure of the "three million Kuma Warriors in three years" target.
[^18]: CommonWealth Magazine: Not Training Militia — Inside Robert Tsao's Kuma Academy, and Why It Has Surprisingly Many Female Students — Analysis of Kuma Academy student demographics and course experience, including the female student quote "I'm not here to fight — I just don't want to not know how to protect my kids if war comes."
[^19]: The Reporter: Han Kuang 41 On-Site Observations — From In-Depth Territorial Defense to National Unity, Taiwan's New Grand Strategy — In-depth field observations of the July 9–18, 2025 Han Kuang 41 exercise: the record ten days and nine nights, mobilization of 20,000 reservists, and full analysis of the in-depth defense strategic transformation.
[^20]: Liberty Times Defense: Han Kuang 41 Pushes Limits — Simulates Military With Only Partial Air Superiority, Fighting a Protracted War — Tactical design of the six-phase Han Kuang 41 scenario (gray zone → wartime deployment → amphibious interdiction → coastal defense → in-depth defense → protracted war) and analysis of ODC's influence.
[^21]: Executive Yuan National Overview: Defense — Overview of the ROC's defense policy under the strategic concept of "resolute defense, multi-domain deterrence"; discussion of the Taiwan Strait's 130–400-kilometer width as a geographic barrier.
[^22]: Flight Global: Taiwan F-16 Block 70 Deliveries Slip into 2027 — Taiwan's 66-aircraft F-16V Block 70 order (US$8 billion contract) delayed from 2024 to 2027 delivery start due to Lockheed Martin supply chain and software issues; full delivery expected by end of 2028.