Taiwan needs to flood the battlefield with cheap, mobile, and survivable weapons to counter China, former senior military officer says

Taiwan should prioritize lots of low-cost survivable weapons for a possible war with China, a former defense official said. Conventional, more exquisite weapons are still useful. But having more asymmetric capabilities would help Taiwan deter and fend off an existential threat. To prepare for a possible all-out war with China, Taiwan should focus on fielding substantial numbers of cheap, mobile, and survivable weapons, a former top Taiwanese defense official said. Taiwan currently faces two types of conflict - what experts and officials have referred to as China's gray-zone activities that are just below the threshold of war and the potential for a full-scale Chinese invasion . Countering both requires an array of weaponry. At a Hudson Institute think tank event earlier this month, retired admiral and former chief of the general staff for Taiwan's defense ministry Lee Hsi-Min said Taiwan needed to prioritize the existential threat of a Chinese invasion. Gray-zone actions, such as frequent aircraft incursions, strain resources and stress assets and troops. The other could be catastrophic, as war games have shown. "We need a large number of the distributed, mobile, survivable, lethal" weapons, Lee argued, and those systems need to be low-cost, high-volume, and highly survivable in a fight, he added. Asymmetric warfare is a strategy that uses large numbers of inexpensive, mobile, hard-to-target systems - like drones, missiles, and dispersed units - to blunt a larger military's advantages by denying it easy targets and inflicting outsized damage. Think drones blowing up tanks in Ukraine or sinking Russian warships. Lee argues that Taiwan's survival in a war against China depends on exactly this kind of strategy. Taiwan has aggressively pursued a strategy focused on weapons that fit these bills, including various types of drones , sensors, jamming, and anti-ship and surface-to-air missiles. Broader elements of increased investments in asymmetric warfare plans include how the civilian population of Taiwan is trained for a potential Chinese invasion and how the Taiwanese military would use urban warfare to hold off Chinese forces. This doesn't mean conventional platforms and high-end weapons aren't valuable, Lee said, especially for helping Taiwan deter the everyday activities the Chinese military engages in, such as aggressive actions in the air and sea and massive exercises regularly held nearby. However, "we need scalable" and "smart enough" weapons, he said. "If we are conducting the protracted war, sometimes the quantity means quality," Lee said. "If we only have a kind of a small number of the advanced, sophisticated platform, I think we will have a big problem if China decided to attack Taiwan." Similar lessons are being learned from the war in Ukraine. Soldiers, veterans, and drone makers have all said that a limited arsenal of exquisite systems isn't the right fit for a long war. The need is large volumes of cheap weapons. In warfare, sustainability is key . Overengineering and overspending simply aren't sustainable in a high-end fight. Lee previously argued for asymmetric warfare and more mobile, uncrewed weapons and systems rather than buying more conventional...

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