The Center for a New American Security (CNAS), a Washington-based think tank, last month recommended that Taiwan establish a four-layer "maritime hellscape" defense zone extending roughly 80 kilometers from its beaches, using combinations of drones and weapons to sink, damage, or disrupt People's Liberation Army (PLA) vessels carrying invasion forces. Rocky Uriankhai (烏凌翔), CEO of the Techforce think tank, appeared on Storm Media's programFly to the World, hosted by Catherine Lu(路怡珍), to analyze what drone tactics Taiwan would need to implement such a strategy.
Uriankhai said the American proposal serves two purposes: buying time for U.S. forces to arrive from a distance, and degrading PLA combat capability. However, he argued that achieving a viable "maritime hellscape" would require at least 200,000 drones per day, and sustaining that posture over several days would demand no fewer than one million — and not all of them would be based in Taiwan.
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Expert Says 200,000 Drones the Bare Minimum to Deter PLA Landing
Uriankhai noted that when the Ministry of National Defense first announced a procurement plan for commercially-sourced military drones, it disclosed a figure of only 3,000 units — widely criticized as far too few. The ministry subsequently clarified that figure represented only a sample order. Last year, it announced a revised total of 48,750 drones, which critics again deemed insufficient. Uriankhai said that to meaningfully deter a PLA amphibious landing, Taiwan needs a minimum of 200,000 drones.
Factoring in arsenal reserves and sustained deterrence, Uriankhai argued the Taiwan Strait theater would require at least one million drones in total. Under the U.S. defense posture in the region, he said, those assets would not all be stationed in Taiwan but distributed across bases in the Philippines, Japan, and Okinawa — spread along the first island chain as a whole. Uriankhai noted that within the current arms procurement discussions, Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense has earmarked a special defense budget of approximately 1.25 trillion New Taiwan dollars (roughly US$3.8 billion) that includes plans to procure more than 200,000 attack drones of various types, along with over 1,000 unmanned surface vessels.
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On counter-drone technology, Uriankhai distinguished between "soft kill" and "hard kill" approaches. Soft kill refers to using radio waves to force drones to crash, but he said this method is becoming increasingly ineffective. "The drones we are building now are one-way — they are never coming back. There is no radio link between us and them, and we don't want one," Uriankhai said. If a drone maintains no ongoing GPS or radio contact, he explained, there is no signal to jam in the first place. Hard kill methods — using interceptor drones, artillery, or missiles — by contrast, inevitably create an attritional exchange.
Uriankhai stressed that the traditional asymmetric warfare assumption — that quality can offset quantity — no longer holds. "Without sufficient numbers, it simply doesn't work," he said, pointing to China's enormous manufacturing capacity and its ability to drive down unit costs at scale. He added that countries surrounding Taiwan, including Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Indonesia, are all developing domestic drone supply chains.
Uriankhai argued that unmanned systems offer a way to keep soldiers off the battlefield. "We don't want our young men and women dying in combat. The best outcome is to send unmanned vehicles instead," he said. "If the future battlefield is machine against machine, there are no human casualties. But that kind of war ultimately comes down to quality — technology must be well ahead of the adversary — and quantity matters just as much. We may be highly capable, but when hundreds of thousands of locusts come swarming, that is very hard to handle."
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