Taiwan's legislature recently approved a NT$780 billion special defense budget ceiling that stripped out all planned commercial purchases and commissioned development of unmanned vehicles and counter-drone systems. President Lai Ching-te has said he will pursue separate special legislation to address the shortfall, while Defense Minister Wellington Koo acknowledged the ministry is reviewing individual line items within the NT$470 billion portion already approved — with uncleared items potentially revisited through special legislation, supplementary budgets, or annual budget cycles.
Yet as the military continues to trumpet the strategic importance of drones and unmanned vessels — a case validated repeatedly on the battlefields of Ukraine — Taiwan's counter-drone capabilities are being left behind. Procedural gaps, legal ambiguities, and procurement failures are raising serious questions about whether the armed forces can defend against the very threat they claim to take most seriously.
A NT$980 Million Contract, Two Failures, and a Third Strike Pending
The Army Command previously allocated approximately NT$980 million to procure 26 fixed-position counter-drone systems from domestic civilian contractors. Those systems have now failed military acceptance testing twice.
Under evaluation criteria requiring detection at six kilometers and successful jamming at four kilometers, the contracted vendor was unable to meet either benchmark in either round. Sources indicate the military used ten of DJI's latest commercial drones — purchased through open-market channels — as simulated threats, deploying them both individually and in swarm configurations to assess the domestic systems' jamming effectiveness. The systems failed on both counts.
A third and final acceptance test is scheduled for June. If the vendor again falls short, the contract will be terminated and the procurement re-tendered.
Why DJI's Global Dominance Makes Taiwan's Gap Particularly Dangerous
The procurement failure carries strategic weight well beyond a bureaucratic setback. DJI — a Chinese company — holds the largest share of the global commercial drone market. The People's Liberation Army represents Taiwan's primary military threat. The combination means Taiwan is struggling to counter a technology whose most advanced commercial variants are produced by a company headquartered in the country most likely to use drones against it.
According to Storm Media's reporting, the military's operational response to drone threats remains at an elementary stage. Current standard operating procedures call for bases to dispatch a one-minute standby unit for aerial reconnaissance upon detecting an unidentified drone, followed by identification, monitoring, alert notification, safety confirmation, and, where necessary, defensive fire.
The critical limitation: this SOP applies only to drones that have already entered a base's airspace. In plain terms, the military is authorized to employ soft-kill or hard-kill countermeasures only once an unidentified drone crosses the perimeter. For drones operating outside that boundary — even directly in front of a base's main gate — the military's only recourse is surveillance and a call to local police.
"Call the Police" — Taiwan's Real Counter-Drone Protocol Outside the Wire
That jurisdictional constraint creates a significant and exploitable defensive gap.
Under the current framework, a drone detected outside a base must be reported to police, who are then responsible for locating the operator and, if warranted, forcing the drone to land or return to its point of origin. But a drone can complete a full surveillance pass around a base perimeter in a matter of minutes — more than enough time for an operator to collect imagery and withdraw before police arrive. In the event of a direct drone attack on a base, the time lag between detection, police notification, and response would effectively neutralize existing defenses.
Chou Yu-ping (周宇平), a former director at the Missile Command, told Storm Media that under the Military Base Security Maintenance Act, photography, sketching, or surveying of military installations is prohibited — but that in practice, if a drone has not entered base airspace, the military has almost no authority to act. "The rule has no bearing on reality," Chou said. Police do have some jurisdiction, since operating a drone to film a military installation constitutes a legal violation. But given how quickly drones move, by the time officers reach the scene, the drone is typically long gone.
Chou also identified a compounding technical problem: neither military nor police personnel may know what frequency band an approaching drone is using, and jamming guns must be precisely tuned to the target frequency to function. Beyond that technical difficulty, police face a strong institutional disincentive to use jamming equipment at all. If a jammed drone falls and causes property damage, injures a bystander, or crashes onto a road, the responding officer bears legal liability. The result, Chou said, is deep institutional reluctance to intervene — leaving two core obstacles unresolved: uncertainty over the correct jamming frequency, and unwillingness to attempt jamming in the first place.
Rules Exist on Paper; Execution Remains Riddled With Gaps
Even where legal frameworks and SOPs are nominally in place, implementation continues to produce new ambiguities. Chou highlighted one particularly significant blind spot: if a drone transmits video in real time to a remote receiver rather than storing footage onboard, intercepting or grounding it yields no evidentiary value. There is no way to determine whether the surveillance was successful — a fundamental gap in current military and police counter-drone doctrine.
The broader picture is one of structural imbalance. Taiwan's military is aggressively developing offensive unmanned systems while its defensive posture against drone threats remains procedurally fragmented, legally constrained, and practically ineffective. Legislation has been amended, SOPs drafted, and budgets pursued — yet the execution layer is riddled with gaps that have not been closed.
Chou's assessment is direct: without a fundamental revision of operational concepts and meaningful optimization of response procedures, additional procurement budgets and offensive drone acquisitions will do little to address the threat. Buying more drones to attack with, while failing to defend against incoming ones, does not constitute a coherent strategy.
Rules Exist on Paper; Execution Remains Riddled With Gaps
Even where legal frameworks and SOPs are nominally in place, implementation continues to produce new ambiguities. Chou highlighted one particularly significant blind spot: if a drone transmits video in real time to a remote receiver rather than storing footage onboard, intercepting or grounding it yields no evidentiary value. There is no way to determine whether the surveillance was successful — a fundamental gap in current military and police counter-drone doctrine.
The broader picture is one of structural imbalance. Taiwan's military is aggressively developing offensive unmanned systems while its defensive posture against drone threats remains procedurally fragmented, legally constrained, and practically ineffective. Legislation has been amended, SOPs drafted, and budgets pursued — yet the execution layer is riddled with gaps that have not been closed.
Chou's assessment is direct: without a fundamental revision of operational concepts and meaningful optimization of response procedures, additional procurement budgets and offensive drone acquisitions will do little to address the threat. Buying more drones to attack with, while failing to defend against incoming ones, does not constitute a coherent strategy.
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