Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense has quietly elevated drone planning to the Vice Chief of the General Staff level, establishing an internal task force to coordinate the island's ambition to field some 200,000 unmanned aerial vehicles — even as a NT$210 billion procurement bill to fund that vision remains locked in a divided legislature, Storm Media has learned.
The disclosure comes days after President Lai Ching-te traveled to the Aeronautical Research Laboratory of the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST) in Taichung on July 17 to inspect UAV development in person. Speaking with uncommon directness, Lai called drones "the most important weapons on the battlefield — the embodiment of asymmetric warfare capability," and renewed his appeal to lawmakers to release military funding, lamenting that defense officials were being summoned to legislative hearings instead of doing their jobs. "The Ministry of National Defense, from the minister down to every soldier, should be able to fight at their posts," he said. "They should not be trapped in the legislature having their time wasted."
From Fragmented Branches to a Unified Drone Command
Taiwan's military used to approach drone procurement the way its service branches approach most things: independently. The Army had its own tactical short-range UAVs. The Navy flew the Albatross (銳鳶) reconnaissance drone. The Air Force operated the Chien Hsiang (劍翔), an anti-radiation loitering munition. Each branch built its own procurement case, issued its own specifications, and signed its own contracts — an arrangement that proved inadequate as unmanned systems moved from novelty to warfighting centerpiece.
That structure is changing. Under the newly disclosed internal arrangement, offensive drones fall under the J3 Operations and Planning Office and are the direct responsibility of Lieutenant General Hou Jia-lun, while surveillance and reconnaissance UAVs are managed by the J2 Intelligence Office under Lieutenant General Xie Ri-sheng. Coordination across both offices is handled by a rotating Vice Chief of the General Staff — drawn from either the Army or Navy depending on current assignments — who serves as convener of regular task force meetings.
The Vice Chief's role is described as that of a standing convener rather than a fixed executive: responsibility rotates between the Army and Navy Vice Chiefs based on operational portfolios. The group holds regular sessions. Its existence has not been publicly announced.
Counter-Drone Scandal Exposes Frequency-Hopping Blind Spot
The urgency behind this reorganization is, in part, the product of a damaging procurement failure that exposed a critical gap in Taiwan's defensive posture.
The Army contracted NT$987.81 million — nearly NT$1 billion — for 26 fixed, ground-based counter-drone systems, awarding the deal to a firm called Tron Future (創未來科技). The company subsequently failed three consecutive performance evaluations and was terminated under contract terms. Taiwan's Control Yuan, the island's top independent oversight body, censured the Ministry of National Defense and flagged the Army Command for potentially showing favoritism to the firm. Opposition legislators, in turn, accused Tron Future of winning the contract through political ties to the ruling Democratic Progressive Party.
Sources familiar with the procurement, however, offered a more technical explanation. The Army conducted its acceptance tests using DJI Mavic 4 drones. Because the Mavic 4 employs frequency-hopping technology — rapidly cycling through radio frequencies to evade jamming — Tron Future's system could not lock onto a stable signal to suppress. All three tests failed on this basis.
The episode laid bare a broader structural problem. With Chinese manufacturers holding an estimated 90% of the global commercial drone market and DJI hardware evolving at a rapid pace, Taiwan's counter-drone technology faces the paradox of being unable to reliably neutralize even off-the-shelf civilian drones — let alone the military-grade unmanned systems the People's Liberation Army is developing. Following the contract's termination, the Army's counter-drone inventory now consists entirely of systems built by NCSIST, including jamming rifles and remote-controlled aerial defense platforms.
How Pentagon-Style Wargames Produced the 200,000 Figure
The plan to procure roughly 200,000 drones did not emerge arbitrarily. Sources familiar with the task force's work say the number was derived from scenario modeling conducted by the ministry's Joint Assessment Division, which simulated how attack and surveillance UAVs should be deployed at each phase of a potential Taiwan Strait conflict — and what mix of drones, missiles, aircraft, naval assets, and coastal artillery would be required to form a complete kill chain.
A military official described the underlying concept in plain terms: think of it as layered attrition. A first wave of assets degrades a portion of enemy combat power; subsequent waves continue degrading across multiple domains — drones, missiles, aircraft, surface vessels, coastal guns — before ground forces engage. The 200,000 figure reflects the UAV mass calculated as necessary for that multi-layer strategy to function at the scale of a cross-strait conflict.
The modeling also addressed phasing: which drone types, in what quantities, should be deployed at which stage of engagement, and how UAVs should integrate with other munitions. The task force's role is to translate those simulation outputs into procurement requirements.
Spectrum Scarcity and Guidance Gaps Raise Wartime Questions
Even if Taiwan eventually procures the drones, deploying 200,000 of them in a wartime environment poses electromagnetic challenges the ministry is still working through. KMT legislator Chen Yong-kang, a former military officer, pressed the issue during a July 16 legislative session, noting that Ukraine's drone fleet relies on Starlink satellite connectivity for guidance — a solution less readily applicable to Taiwan's much smaller territory. If the power grid fails and civilian WiFi goes down during a conflict, he asked, how many microwave guidance frequencies does Taiwan actually have, and has the ministry coordinated spectrum allocation with the Ministry of Digital Affairs?
General Huang Chih-Wei (黃志偉), the ministry's Vice Chief of the General Staff (Executive), acknowledged the challenges in response. He said the MND is working on national communications resilience under the National Security Council's direction, that rules of engagement governing drone navigation, target identification, and target engagement have already been incorporated into existing operational plans, and that future UAV procurement will be matched against "future battlefield requirements."
Industry insiders note that the military currently lacks dedicated drone specialists, relying instead on working groups drawn from planning, operations, and logistics units. One source observed that the sophistication of the military's understanding can often be read directly from the specifications it issues in procurement documents. As one example: 4G cellular connectivity has long been commercially viable for drone teleoperation, allowing a field commander in Taoyuan to remotely pilot UAVs in Yilan via a cellular base station relay. That capability, the source noted, has not appeared in any military procurement specification to date.
Electronic Warfare Remains Taiwan's Most Stubborn Weakness
A military official acknowledged bluntly that Taiwan's counter-drone capability lags. Electronic warfare is among the most closely guarded technical domains in any military, and acquiring meaningful technology transfer from foreign partners is extremely difficult. NCSIST has invested substantially in counter-drone research, but the challenge of iterating fast enough to match well-funded foreign manufacturers — civilian and military alike — is structurally different from developing the original system.
The current plan calls for importing proven foreign systems in phases while building indigenous capacity in parallel. But even that path has complications. The NT$1.25 trillion national defense special budget, submitted earlier, included a classified "hard-kill/soft-kill hybrid counter-drone system" — details redacted — alongside 635 man-portable counter-drone units capable of detecting targets at four kilometers and jamming them at two, intended to address saturation drone attacks at the lower end of the threat spectrum. The man-portable systems target Category 1 and 2 small and medium drones; the classified hybrid system targets larger Category 2-plus platforms.
Zhou Yu-ping, a consultant to the Taiwan Think Tank, identified frequency hopping as the central technical obstacle for Taiwan's counter-drone program. Most of Taiwan's existing counter-drone systems detect fixed-frequency signals; a next-generation capability must track signals that hop across the spectrum in real time — and the wider a drone's bandwidth, the harder it becomes to jam. Active radar will also be necessary to detect fiber-optic-guided or AI-directed drones that passive detection cannot reliably locate. Because drone technology can evolve on a four-to-six-month cycle, Zhou argued that domestic suppliers are preferable for this equipment category: by the time an imported system clears procurement and reaches Taiwan through a distributor, the threat profile may have already advanced.
Doctrine Advances, Budget Stays Frozen
The institutional shift is real. Taiwan's military, which once treated small drones as impractical novelties, now manages unmanned systems from the Vice Chief of the General Staff level down, with distinct organizational lanes for offensive and surveillance missions, a regular task force to coordinate across both, and simulation-driven doctrine guiding procurement targets. The NT$210 billion special procurement bill — itself a second attempt, after the drone component of a broader NT$1.25 trillion defense special budget was stripped from that legislation entirely — reflects how central UAVs have become to Taiwan's defense calculus.
Whether the legislature will authorize the funding remains unresolved. The ministry has repeatedly dispatched officials to brief opposition lawmakers. Sources say the American Institute in Taiwan — the de facto U.S. embassy on the island — also sent representatives to gauge the opposition's position after the bill was submitted, a signal of Washington's stake in Taiwan's drone buildup.
The wargames have been run. The task force is meeting. The doctrine is written. What Taiwan's military cannot yet do is fly. （Related： Taiwan's Drone 'National Team': Strategic Breakthrough or Expensive Mirage? ｜ Latest ）
