As the Executive Yuan sends its draft special statute on domestic unmanned vehicle procurement to the Legislative Yuan — with opposition parties readying rival bills of their own — Taiwan is finally having the debate it should have had years ago: what would a drone-heavy military actually do for our ability to survive an invasion?
The honest answer is: a great deal, if the Ministry of National Defense chooses wisely. The wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have made one thing clear. Drones have broken the old logic of warfare, and that break works in Taiwan's favor. A country with far fewer resources than its adversary can now strike deep into that adversary's rear areas across open water, and can slow an invading force's advance on land, in ways that were simply not possible a decade ago. Used correctly, this technology could deny China the one thing its invasion plan depends on: speed.
Air Superiority No Longer Guarantees a Blockade
For eighty years, the rule of ground warfare was simple: whoever controlled the air controlled the battlefield. Air superiority meant you could stop an enemy from reinforcing his front line, cut his supply routes, and strike his rear with impunity. Everyone assumed that without it, none of that was possible.
Ukraine has proven that rule obsolete. Russia's air force still holds local control of the skies near the front — enough to keep Ukrainian jets away from Russian soil and the front line itself. And yet Russia cannot stop Ukrainian medium-range drones from hitting supply convoys, bridges, air-defense batteries and logistics nodes tens or even hundreds of kilometers behind the line. In some sectors, this has produced something close to what used to require full air dominance: battlefield interdiction from a position of air inferiority.
Look at the R-280, the 300-mile highway running from Rostov-on-Don through occupied Mariupol and Melitopol to Crimea. With the Kerch Bridge repeatedly crippled, this road has become Russia's main southern-front lifeline — and its critical link, the Chonhar Bridge, has been under systematic Ukrainian drone attack since April 2026. Traffic across it fell 71% in just two weeks.
These drones don't carry anywhere near the payload of a guided bomb or a cruise missile. They can't drop a bridge in one strike. What they can do is keep damaging the roadway and picking off vehicles at the choke points, so that traffic backs up again and again — and every convoy stuck in that jam becomes an easy target for the next drone that arrives. Russia has thrown considerable air-defense and counter-drone resources at the problem and still cannot protect 300 miles of highway.
Cheap Drones Now Do a Missile's Job
Both the Ukraine war and the recent U.S.-Iran war have shown that drones can carry out the kind of long-range strategic strikes once reserved for bombers, ballistic missiles and cruise missiles — at a tiny fraction of the cost.
Consider what happened in the U.S.-Iran war. American and Israeli forces had all but wiped out Iran's air force and air-defense network and held complete control of the sky. None of that stopped Iranian drones from taking out a $1.1 billion AN/FPS-132 long-range early-warning radar at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, or from hitting a roughly $300 million AN/TPY-2 radar at Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan — degrading an entire THAAD battery, worth around $1 billion, that depended on it. The lesson is not about explosive yield. It's about precision: these drones went straight for the radar and the engagement-control stations that an expensive weapons system cannot function without, and crippled the whole system by taking out its weakest node.
Both sides in Ukraine have leaned hard into this playbook against each other's rear areas. Russia fired a record 7,433 long-range attack drones in May 2026 alone, pushing its year-to-date total past 30,000. Ukraine has matched that intensity, at times launching 200 to 300 drones a night for several nights running, and roughly 600 in a single day on May 17 against targets that included Moscow itself.
In mid-May, Russia hit Kyiv and cities across western Ukraine with 1,567 drones and 56 missiles in 36 hours. Ukraine hit back just as hard: more than 350 long-range drones broke through Russian air defenses to strike the Ryazan refinery southeast of Moscow, which supplies 30% of the capital region's fuel, directly hitting both of its crude-distillation units. A refinery in Perm — nearly 1,250 miles from the front — was also hit.
The result has been refineries taken offline across Russia's interior, a 4.5% drop in national gasoline output in a single month, and Russian commanders forced to pull air-defense systems back from the front to protect infrastructure deep in their own territory. That is what deep strike, done with drones instead of missiles, can accomplish against a country with a real air force and real air defenses.
Small Drones Have Frozen the Front Line Itself
Ground combat in Ukraine tells the third part of this story. With cheap micro- and small drones saturating both sides of the front, the area from the buffer zone between the two lines back through each side's rear has become what soldiers now call a kill zone — 10 to 15 kilometers wide, and up to 50 kilometers in the most dangerous sectors. Step into it with an armored vehicle or on foot in daylight, and you will be found and hit almost immediately. Even small tactical movements have become nearly impossible, and the kind of large conventional ground assault that used to decide wars simply cannot happen anymore. The front has been frozen for long stretches at a time.
One Ukrainian infantryman described being trapped in a front-line trench for 225 days. When his rotation finally came, it took him nearly 48 hours to cover the 11 kilometers back to his brigade headquarters — a walk that would normally take under three hours — because he had to dodge Russian drone surveillance the entire way.
Soldiers on both sides describe the same reality: the armored column and the mass infantry charge are gone. What's left is two or three soldiers at a time, moving on foot or by bicycle at night or in bad weather when small drones struggle to fly, trying to slip through gaps in the enemy line. Taking a city this way, one soldier at a time, takes an almost unbelievably long time.
What Taiwan Should Take From All of This
The lesson for Taiwan's defense is not subtle. A large arsenal of medium- and long-range drones would sharply increase our capacity to strike military targets along China's southeastern coast — more firepower, greater range, and a higher kill rate against an invading force's launch points. Even in the worst case, where the People's Liberation Army secures full air dominance over the strait, drones would let us keep hitting the fixed, hard-to-move targets that an invasion depends on: transport corridors, transit hubs, logistics bases.
It's worth noting that Chinese military scholars writing about a Taiwan invasion are already nervous about this. They point to Taiwan's growing ammunition stockpiles and strike range as a mounting threat to PLA air-defense sites, coastal anti-ship missile batteries, ballistic missile positions and radar stations — and they worry openly about the vulnerability of troops during assembly and loading. Some have gone so far as to warn that Taiwan's long-range firepower could leave the PLA's "logistics support system in danger of collapse."
Add a large fleet of medium- and long-range drones to that existing cross-strait strike capability, pair it with an AI-assisted battlefield management platform along the lines of the PRISMA system used by Ukraine's Defense Intelligence directorate, and — with U.S. intelligence support — Taiwan could keep hitting PLA rear bases and logistics networks even after other cross-strait strike options are exhausted. That is how you throw an invasion off its timetable, or leave parts of its supply chain paralyzed.
Which is exactly why the gap in the current draft legislation is so frustrating. Of the 209,646 coastal surveillance and coastal attack drones the Executive Yuan's bill proposes to procure domestically, the surveillance model has a control range of just 100 kilometers, and even the longest-range attack variant tops out at 90 kilometers. That's enough to threaten PLA ships crossing the strait. It is nowhere near enough to strike the rear areas that would actually matter. The Ministry of National Defense needs to be planning, in its next budget cycles, to acquire genuinely long-range drones — in the 800-to-2,000-kilometer class Ukraine has fielded — or this legislation will have missed the point.
There's a second lesson here too, for the ground war itself. If front-line units are equipped to 3D-print simple small drones on-site, using components stockpiled before the fighting starts, and if that's paired with the Team Awareness Kit systems Taiwan has begun adopting, our smallest units could gain a real edge in reconnaissance and precision strike. That combination is what could deny an invading force — however strong its conventional firepower — the ability to mount large, organized assaults, and keep it from doing what it needs to do: take the whole island quickly.
*The author is an associate research fellow at the Institute for Defense Strategy and Resources, Institute for National Defense and Security Research. （Related： Orqa and Remote Robotic Systems Launch $150M Partnership to Build Canadian Sovereign Capability in Drones, AI, and Counter-UAS Systems ｜ Latest ）
