Exclusive | Ex-U.S. Intelligence Chief: Taiwan's Strongest Defense Is Not Just Military

When Rear Adm. Michael Studeman briefed then-President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2021 on likely Chinese military moves ahead of any invasion, Tsai told him she had waited four years for exactly that kind of assessment.

The remark, disclosed during U.S. congressional testimony last July, captures a warning Studeman has carried since: Taiwan's most serious vulnerabilities lie not on its shores but within its own society.

Studeman retired in 2023 as director of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). Before that, as intelligence director for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, he visited Taiwan three times as an active-duty two-star admiral — the highest-ranking active-duty U.S. military visits to the island since Washington severed formal ties with Taipei in 1979.

Two of those trips included direct briefings for Tsai. The 2021 session, authorized by the White House National Security Council and the Office of the Secretary of Defense, examined likely PRC military moves preceding an assault. A follow-up visit in 2022 reviewed lessons the U.S. military had drawn from the first year of Russia's war in Ukraine.

Both sessions carried the same central message: conventional military planning is necessary, but not sufficient.

"If Taiwan focuses only on an outside-in, military-focused approach to external defense, Taiwan cannot survive," Studeman told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) at a July 2025 hearing titled "Standing with Taiwan: Countering PRC Political Warfare and Transnational Repression."

Beijing's political warfare apparatus, built over decades, has already created exploitable weaknesses inside Taiwan that any military operation would seek to use, he warned. Effective defense must therefore extend well beyond the waterline — encompassing defense in depth, urban warfare readiness, internal security, counterintelligence, civil-military coordination, and social mobilization capable of sustaining a society-wide will to resist.

Tsai Ing-wen's Reaction: "I Waited Four Years for This Briefing"

When the 2021 briefing ended, Tsai told Studeman she had waited four years for precisely that kind of discussion. COVID-19 protocols meant the two greeted each other with an elbow bump rather than a handshake — a detail Studeman recounted before Congress as a small marker of an extraordinary meeting.

In an exclusive interview with Storm Media in early May, Studeman pushed back against the widespread focus on 2027 as Taiwan's peak danger period. The so-called Davidson Window — named for then-Indo-Pacific Command chief Adm. Philip Davidson's 2021 congressional testimony — reflects a broad U.S. institutional assessment that Xi Jinping has directed the PLA to be capable of seizing Taiwan by that year. Capability and the decision to act, however, are not the same thing.

The higher-risk window, in Studeman's assessment, runs from 2028 to 2032: the years after Xi consolidates a fourth five-year term at the Chinese Communist Party's 21st National Congress, expected in autumn 2027.

Taiwan, the United States and their partners can raise the cost of aggression by demonstrating political resolve, strengthening combined military power, deepening multilateral cooperation and monitoring shifts in China's internal conditions — each a variable that complicates any decision Xi might face.

"Under certain conditions, Xi Jinping might very much want to use force," Studeman said. "So you need to actively shape those conditions rather than be carried along by them. Build your own strength, make yourself more resilient — don't give anyone reason to see you as easy prey."

No future is predetermined, he added. The goal is to make any potential move appear so costly and complex that the temptation to act recedes. （Related： Exclusive | Pei Minxin: Beijing Won Nothing Lasting from the Trump–Xi Summit ｜ Latest ）

​Original Article in Chinese​