Taiwan Defense and Military Modernization

30-second overview: The 2022 Russia-Ukraine war changed Taiwan's defense logic. In 2024, conscription was restored from four months to one year. In 2025, the Han Kuang 41 exercise ran for ten days and nine nights, the longest in its history, mobilizing 20,000 reservists. In November that same year, the Lai Ching-te administration proposed a NT$1.25 trillion special budget to procure 200,000 drones. Yet on the same list, most of the money was still allocated to tanks, fighter jets, submarines, and other expensive conventional equipment. Former Chief of the General Staff Lee Hsi-ming said with a wry smile: "If even tanks can be asymmetric weapons, then what is not an asymmetric weapon?" Taiwan is walking two defense paths at once, and those two paths conflict with each other.

At the Hukou military parade ground in late October 2025, a row of M1A2T Abrams tanks stood on the concrete. Lai Ching-te stepped down from the reviewing stand to preside over the activation ceremony, announcing that the "world's strongest tank" had formally entered Taiwan's order of battle. The first batch of 38 vehicles arrived in Taiwan in December 2024, the second batch of 42 arrived in July 2025, and the final batch of 28 was scheduled for delivery in the first quarter of 2026. The 108 tanks are deployed with the 584th Armored Brigade in Hukou and the 269th Mechanized Infantry Brigade¹.

At the same time, former Chief of the General Staff Lee Hsi-ming was signing books in bookstores. His book The Overall Defense Concept argues that Taiwan should not buy expensive large-scale weapons, but should instead invest in large numbers of cheap, mobile, concealable small systems. When asked what he thought of the Ministry of National Defense using "decisive battle at the beachhead" as its rationale for buying M1A2T tanks, he smiled bitterly and said: "Seeing this, all I can do is smile bitterly. If even tanks can be asymmetric weapons, then what is not an asymmetric weapon?"²

That sentence is the most honest key to understanding Taiwan's defense in 2026. The government talks about pursuing a porcupine strategy, while signing contracts for America's most expensive weapons. It declares defense autonomy, while 90 percent of the budget is to be paid to U.S. suppliers. It extends conscription, while acknowledging that 200,000 drones are the future main combat force. These contradictions are not oversights. They are the back-and-forth pull of an island caught between two logics of survival. It wants to become a porcupine, but its body still remembers that it used to be a leopard.

Why the porcupine

The term Porcupine Strategy was coined in 2008 by William Murray, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College, in an academic paper. His argument was simple: Taiwan cannot defeat the People's Liberation Army in conventional military power. Any warship costing billions of dollars, any expensive fighter aircraft, might survive for only hours after war begins. The only rational approach is to buy large numbers of cheap land-based mobile missiles, sea mines, and air-defense systems, turning Taiwan into a porcupine that is "not worth eating"³.

The concept was not immediately accepted in Taiwan. The person who truly turned it into a military strategy was former Chief of the General Staff Lee Hsi-ming. In 2017, while in office, Lee completed an internal document that the military called the Overall Defense Concept, or ODC. Its core was one question: if the PLA really attacks, how does Taiwan make itself "hard to eat"? Lee's answer was sea mines, mobile missile vehicles, man-portable shoulder-fired missiles, and large numbers of drones: cheap, numerous, concealable systems that can fire and run⁴.

His logic was the same as Murray's: Taiwan does not need to win. It only needs to make the cost of invasion so high that the other side does not dare gamble.

But after Lee retired in 2019, ODC was sidelined. The Ministry of National Defense bought more fighter jets, more tanks, and continued pushing the indigenous submarine program. When reporters asked Lee what he thought, he said President Tsai Ing-wen was "the president who has shown the most respect for the military that I have ever seen," but he also added: "Does she understand ODC? I am not sure, because different people may interpret it differently."⁵

📝 Curator's Note
What makes ODC counterintuitive is that it challenges the military's entire self-identity. For career officers, "fighter jets, warships, and tanks" are the pillars of service culture. Buying drones is tantamount to admitting that the army, navy, and air force have all become "secondary" actors. The reason ODC was sidelined after Lee Hsi-ming's retirement was partly strategic disagreement, and partly the survival instinct of the services.

From four months to one year

Taiwan's conscription system is the thermometer of the island's security anxiety.

In the 1950s, mandatory service lasted three years. At the height of the Cold War, Taiwan maintained a standing force of 600,000 troops, and adult men entered military service. After the Cold War ended in the 1990s, service periods began to shorten. In the 2000s, Taiwan moved toward a mixed volunteer-and-conscription system. In 2013, mandatory service was reduced to four months. Military commentators joked that it had become "summer camp"⁶.

The turning point was Russia's war against Ukraine in February 2022. A country that had been expected to surrender within three days held out with drones, portable Stinger missiles, and whole-of-society mobilization, and within six months drove Russian forces out of Kyiv. The resonance this war produced in Taiwanese society is difficult to describe. Suddenly, everyone was asking a question they had previously been afraid to ask: what if it were us?

On December 27, 2022, Tsai Ing-wen stood at a press conference and announced that compulsory service would be restored to one year beginning in January 2024. She called it a "difficult but necessary decision." Monthly pay for conscripts rose from about NT$6,500 to NT$26,307⁷.

The training content of the new one-year system was also revamped: eight weeks of basic entry training, 18 weeks of unit training, seven weeks of specialized training, 13 weeks of base training, and six weeks of joint exercises. Riflemen would fire no fewer than 800 live rounds. Compared with the stereotype of the old four-month system as "standing guard and sweeping floors," this was a rebuilding of the skeleton.

⚠️ Contested View
Polling support for restoring one-year conscription exceeded 70 percent, but reactions among the young generation actually facing service were complex. VOA interviewed several men of draft age. Some admitted they feared war, some questioned whether one year of training could truly produce combat capability, and some said bluntly: "I do not want to give my life for politicians' mistakes." Supporters see this as the minimum obligation of national defense. Critics see one year as still insufficient. One-year service is both a consensus and a compromise. No one is truly satisfied, but most people accept that this is as far as Taiwan can currently go⁸.

The Hai Kun's 147 days

Taiwan has long relied on U.S. arms sales. F-16 fighter jets, Patriot missiles, M1A2 tanks, Harpoon missiles: almost all heavy equipment has come from Washington. This binds Taiwan's defense to U.S. political will. When the White House changes hands, the pace of arms sales may change.

"Defense autonomy" therefore became a long-term goal, and the indigenous submarine program is its flagship project. On September 28, 2023, Taiwan's first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (hull number 711), was launched at CSBC's Kaohsiung shipyard. The submarine is 70 meters long, displaces about 2,500 tons, and uses an X-form rudder design. Tsai Ing-wen said that day: "History will remember this day." The plan calls for seven more submarines of the same class⁹.

But what history may remember is not the 2023 launch ceremony, but the delays of the next two years. The original 2024 delivery schedule was postponed. Only on June 17, 2025, did the Hai Kun formally enter sea trials, beginning with surface navigation tests, then shallow-water submerged trials, and finally deep-water submerged trials. By November 28, 2025, the Hai Kun ended a 147-day period moored without going to sea and again went out for surface navigation verification. Several key steps remained before submerged trials could be completed¹⁰.

When Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo was asked about the Hai Kun's timeline, he gave an answer that senior military officials rarely say out loud: "Other countries' newly built indigenous submarines usually take more than seven years, and there are even cases of 16 years. Our country initially set only five years. That was overly optimistic and failed to understand reality, especially our national circumstances."¹¹

Koo did not set a delivery timetable. He said only: "Only when testing is complete and safety is assured will the subsequent delivery process begin."

✦ "History will remember this day." These were Tsai Ing-wen's original words at the Hai Kun launch ceremony on September 28, 2023. Two years later, the Hai Kun had still not completed submerged trials. History will remember this day, but not necessarily in the way the person who said those words imagined.

Between the "strongest tank" and the "cheapest drone"

In November 2025, the Lai Ching-te administration proposed the Special Act for Strengthening Defense Resilience and Acquiring Asymmetric Combat Capabilities, planning an eight-year special defense budget of NT$1.25 trillion, or about US$40 billion. If passed, Taiwan's defense spending would rise from the current 2.5 percent of GDP to 3.3 percent. About NT$950 billion, or 76 percent, would flow to U.S. arms manufacturers for the purchase of conventional weapons platforms¹².

The other half of the same budgetary picture: the plan calls for procuring more than 200,000 drones of various types and more than a thousand uncrewed surface vessels, including multirotor reconnaissance drones, fixed-wing attack drones, and suicide drones. About NT$300 billion would be spent on domestic manufacturing in Taiwan, building what is called a "non-red supply chain," a defense industrial system that excludes Chinese components¹³.

Putting these two halves together reveals the contradiction behind Lee Hsi-ming's bitter smile: the porcupine strategy has been accepted rhetorically, but the budget still leans toward large conventional weapons.

At the same time, three names appeared in the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology's domestic drone program. They represent Taiwan's attempt to localize the "Ukraine experience":

• Chien Hsiang: an anti-radiation suicide drone that entered mass production in 2023, with 104 units to be produced for the air force over six years. It can analyze radar electronic parameters and, after detecting enemy air-defense radar signals, carry out high-speed "suicide attacks," similar in concept to Israel's Harpy¹⁴
• Rui Yuan II: a medium- to long-range reconnaissance drone with a 12-meter wingspan, a control range of 300 kilometers, and a maximum range of 2,000 kilometers. An armed attack variant is under development
• Teng Yun II: a large MALE, or medium-altitude long-endurance, drone using the same engine as the U.S. MQ-9B, with an endurance of more than 20 hours. It has not yet entered mass production

None of the three is cheap, and none is truly "mass" in scale. The real 200,000 drones will probably be smaller, cheaper tactical drones, possibly with airframes made by 3D printing. On the Ukrainian battlefield, an FPV drone costing tens of thousands of Taiwan dollars can destroy a tank worth hundreds of millions. That equation has changed the calculations of every modern military.

But the fate of the NT$1.25 trillion budget is not a strategic question. It is a political question. Since December 2, 2025, the Legislative Yuan, led by the two opposition parties, has blocked the special budget bill at least eight times. The opposition has questioned the budgeting method and oversight mechanisms. The ruling party has accused budget blockers of blocking national defense. When a delegation of U.S. members of Congress visited Taiwan, they publicly called on the Legislative Yuan to pass the budget, and the U.S. representative in Taiwan took the rare step of directly voicing support¹⁵.

This Legislative Yuan battle is in fact the third layer of contradiction in Taiwan's defense: 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. What it reflects is not military strength, but political will. Many countries have money to buy weapons. Few are willing to bear the political cost of buying them. Taiwan is both kinds of country at once: wealthy and divided. The real wager of the NT$1.25 trillion is not what will be procured, but whether it can pass politically at all.

Kuma Academy: Chen Shui-bian's open letter

The deepest change in Taiwan's defense is not in the weapons list, but in conversations in living rooms and cafes.

Kuma Academy is a civil organization founded in 2021 by Shen Pao-yang, a criminology professor at National Taipei University, and Ho Cheng-hui, a veteran civil-defense researcher. It focuses on "whole-of-society defense" education. Its basic camp has four courses: modern military literacy to dispel military rumors, information verification and cognitive warfare to counter disinformation, wartime first aid including bleeding control and casualty transport, and evacuation and shelter preparation¹⁶.

In 2022, semiconductor entrepreneur Robert Tsao announced that he would donate NT$600 million to support Kuma Academy. On January 7, 2025, former president Chen Shui-bian publicly disclosed online that Tsao had fulfilled the pledge, and revealed that the target the two sides had set was to "train three million Kuma warriors within three years." That figure would account for about one-third of Taiwan's nine million households, with the hope that at least one person in each household would have basic defense knowledge¹⁷.

Kuma Academy's courses were fully booked from the moment they opened. One female participant told Global Views Monthly: "I am not trying to fight a war. I just do not want, when war comes, to not even know how to protect my children." That sentence later became Kuma Academy's own promotional copy¹⁸.

✦ "I am not trying to fight a war. I just do not want, when war comes, to not even know how to protect my children." This is the most honest sentence in Taiwan's defense consciousness in 2026. It is not patriotism. It is the most primal family instinct.

The All-Out Defense Mobilization Readiness Act also established a reserve mobilization system. After 2022, reserve recall training expanded from five days at a time to 14 days, with training intensity substantially increased. Official estimates say more than two million reservists can be mobilized. Added to a standing force of 180,000, this means that in wartime, the armed manpower that could theoretically be mobilized would approach one-tenth of Taiwan's labor force.

Han Kuang 41: ten days and nine nights of defense in depth

At dawn on July 9, 2025, the Han Kuang 41 exercise began simultaneously across Taiwan. Lasting ten days and nine nights, it was the longest Han Kuang exercise since the drills began in 1984. It mobilized 20,000 reservists, also the largest number ever¹⁹.

The biggest difference between Han Kuang 41 and past exercises was the mood of its scenario. Previous Han Kuang exercises tended to display military posture: tanks in formation, fighter jets roaring overhead, naval vessels in line. The core assumption of Han Kuang 41 was brutal: in wartime, Taiwan's armed forces will have only partial air superiority and must fight a protracted war.

The exercise was divided into six phases:

1. Days 1-3: Chinese gray-zone harassment, with Taiwan entering "routine crisis handling." This was a lesson the Russia-Ukraine war gave Taiwan: war does not begin with tanks crossing a border. It begins with fishing-boat harassment, communications interference, and floods of disinformation
2. Day 4: combat preparation deployment, involving troop movement and position construction
3. Days 5-10: formal outbreak of war, divided into four sub-phases: counter-landing, littoral combat, defense in depth, and protracted operations

The last three sub-phases, littoral combat, defense in depth, and protracted operations, were the real new elements in Han Kuang 41. They explicitly acknowledged that the standing force cannot defend the entire depth of Taiwan's territory. Reservists must go to the second line, using conscripts and reserve units to hold up enemy forces that have broken through, allowing the main combat units made up of volunteer soldiers to find openings for counterattack.

This is the shadow of ODC. Lee Hsi-ming's concept was to turn Taiwan into a "net": if the front cannot be held, fall back into the depth, and make the enemy pay wherever it advances. Han Kuang 41 was the first systematic adoption of this concept in an exercise script²⁰.

160 kilometers and a wager

The Taiwan Strait is about 130 kilometers wide at its narrowest point and about 400 kilometers at its widest. In military studies, this body of water is regarded as a natural barrier for anti-access/area denial, or A2/AD. For the PLA to cross the Taiwan Strait, it would need not only ships and aircraft, but continuous air and sea superiority for several weeks and amphibious landing capability. Only two or three existing militaries in the world can do this²¹.

Taiwan's defense strategy is built on a cold calculation: it does not need to win. It only needs to hold out until international intervention arrives. A porcupine does not need to defeat the hunter. It only needs to make the hunter feel that "eating this one is not worth it." M1A2T tanks, F-16V fighter jets, and the Hai Kun submarine are not tasked with defeating the PLA. Their task is to buy time. The 200,000 drones, 20,000 reservists, and three million Kuma warriors are doing the same thing.

But the premise of this calculation is that the international community will intervene.

F-16V Block 70 deliveries were originally scheduled for 2024, but because of U.S. supply-chain and software problems, they were delayed to 2027 onward²². The Hai Kun has been delayed by more than two years from launch to projected delivery. The NT$1.25 trillion special budget has been blocked eight times in the Legislative Yuan. M1A2T tanks arrived on schedule, but in Lee Hsi-ming's eyes they are precisely the sort of weapon that raises the question: how can tanks be asymmetric weapons? Every timetable, every budget line, every type of equipment points to the same reminder: Taiwan's defense is not Taiwan's plan alone.

Further reading:

• Taiwan Strait Crises and the Development of Cross-Strait Relations — How the three Taiwan Strait crises shaped the structural logic of today's Cross-Strait military standoff
• Taiwan's Diplomatic Allies and International Diplomacy — The other path beyond military self-defense: Taiwan's diplomatic breakthrough in search of presence within the international system
• Taiwan's Political Environment and Electoral System — Why the NT$1.25 trillion special budget was blocked eight times in the Legislative Yuan, and why national defense is not decided by a single government
• Development of Taiwan's Cybersecurity Industry — The front line of gray-zone warfare is not sea mines, but firewalls
• Development of Taiwan's Space Industry — From civilian satellites to defense communications, space is the new battlefield of Taiwan's defense resilience
• The 2026 Cheng-Xi Meeting: Ten Minutes Between KMT and CCP Leaders After Ten Years — When Cheng Li-wun proposed "institutional arrangements to prevent war," behind it lay the political battle over the special defense budget
• Shen Pao-yang — Co-founder of Kuma Academy, strengthening Taiwan's whole-of-society defense resilience through civil-defense education; after seven years studying CCP cognitive warfare, he was placed under investigation by China for "splitting the state"
• Cho Jung-tai — The Executive Yuan's chief promoter of the NT$1.25 trillion special defense budget, and the proposer of the "Taiwan Shield" and "three good pitches"
• Lu Shiow-yen — KMT vice chair and Taichung mayor, who took a middle-range position of "NT$800 billion to NT$1 trillion" in the 2026 arms-procurement controversy
• Hsu Chiao-hsin — KMT legislator and chief promoter of the NT$800 billion arms-procurement version, a political archetype of repeated clashes with Lai Ching-te during legislative questioning
• Chi Lin-lien — KMT vice chair and retired lieutenant general, whose remarks at the April 29 Central Standing Committee meeting triggered a split in the pan-Blue camp's arms-procurement line
• Samuel Yin — By using precast construction methods to shorten TSMC, Google, and Microsoft plant construction in Taiwan to 100 days, he became an invisible infrastructure pillar of Taiwan's semiconductor competitiveness; he is also a typical Taiwanese business figure making dual bets across the Strait, having stated in 2013 that "unification is inevitable"

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