Taiwan's legislature has blocked funding for unmanned military systems for months, and Defense Minister Wellington Koo (顧立雄) is no longer masking his alarm. The impasse, he warned in a media roundtable that included Storm Media, is directly degrading the armed forces' ability to fight a modern war — and Taiwan cannot afford to keep waiting.
The stakes are not abstract. Drones, unmanned boats, suicide surface vessels, robot dogs, and underwater platforms are no longer emerging technology — they are standard battlefield equipment, proven in Ukraine and in the recent US-Iran exchange of fire. Every month the legislature stalls is a month Taiwan falls further behind.
Legislature Slashes Defense Funding, Wipes Out All Drone Allocations
The roots of the standoff go back to Taiwan's Executive Yuan submitting a NT$1.25 trillion (approximately US$39 billion) special defense appropriations package to the Legislative Yuan — Taiwan's parliament. Legislators cut it to NT$780 billion, stripping every dollar earmarked for unmanned systems in the process.
The Executive Yuan responded by carving the unmanned vehicle component into a standalone NT$210 billion (approximately US$6.5 billion) special budget. The ruling Democratic Progressive Party, the main opposition Kuomintang, and the smaller Taiwan People's Party have each submitted competing versions, all pending before the legislature with no resolution in sight. Compounding the dysfunction, Taiwan's 2026 annual general budget has also yet to pass.
Koo was quick to correct a common misconception: the NT$210 billion is not an entirely new program. The unmanned systems component was always part of the original NT$1.25 trillion package. What's been extracted and resubmitted as a separate bill, he explained, is the portion the government wants produced entirely on domestic soil — a distinction that goes to the heart of Taiwan's defense strategy.
Ukraine's War Makes the Case for Domestic Drone Manufacturing
Wartime consumption rates are what drive the push for sovereign production capacity. Combat in Ukraine showed that unmanned vehicles are destroyed faster than conventional supply chains can replace them. Taiwan's planners are building on that lesson: the NT$210 billion allocation targets coastal surveillance drones, coastal attack drones, and small suicide unmanned boats — the platforms most likely to be expended at scale in any future conflict.
"The reason we are emphasizing this as a special budget is to stress that this portion must be produced with complete self-reliance," Koo said. The plan is to place large, long-term government orders with domestic manufacturers, giving them the volume commitments needed to build out scaled production lines. An explicit condition is eliminating components tied to Chinese suppliers — what officials call "red supply chains."
Taiwan's National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST), the state defense research body, is already co-developing the Mighty Hornet IV drone with U.S. defense firm Kratos, targeting the international market. Ground unmanned vehicles have been folded into the fiscal year 2027 annual defense budget. The military is also pursuing small-batch acquisitions of robot dogs, long-endurance maritime surveillance vessels, covert supply unmanned boats, and underwater drones, with NCSIST working with multiple foreign partners across all domains.
On counter-drone capabilities, Koo said the military has designed a tiered response. Portable soft-kill jamming systems are being procured for company- and battalion-level self-defense. Harder-kill options — 30mm chain-gun turrets and interceptor systems — are available for higher-threat scenarios. High-energy microwave and laser systems remain in research phases globally and are not yet field-ready.
Koo Draws a Hard Line Against the NT$40 Billion Cap
The sharpest dispute involves the Kuomintang's competing bill. Beyond the KMT's insistence on placing the Ministry of Economic Affairs — rather than the Ministry of National Defense — in charge of unmanned vehicle policy, the opposition proposal would impose a NT$40 billion (approximately US$1.25 billion) hard ceiling covering every unmanned platform across all domains: air, surface, ground, and undersea, plus testing infrastructure and industry support.
Koo rejected that ceiling without qualification. "I genuinely do not want to see a version that bundles all unmanned vehicles together and tells the Defense Ministry to make do with NT$40 billion — that version would truly limit the military's future possibilities," he said. NT$40 billion, he noted, would not even cover the full scope of what the bill proposes to regulate, and could squeeze out programs already in progress — including potential procurement of the MQ-9B Reaper remotely piloted aircraft, which the United States has authorized for sale to Taiwan.
If the NT$210 billion executive version fails outright, Koo said the ministry could absorb the programs into the annual budget cycle. But capping all unmanned vehicles at NT$40 billion through legislation is a different matter entirely. "That kind of legislation," he said, "is simply unacceptable."
The legislature, in effect, is holding a knife to the Defense Ministry's throat. As every major military in the region races to field autonomous systems, and as battlefields from Europe to the Middle East validate their effectiveness, Taiwan — facing the most acute threat of all — finds itself watching a critical window close. Even foreign observers, Koo noted, are struggling to understand the delay. The armed forces may be ready to fight. The budget battle is another matter. （Related： Han Kuang 42 | Koo Dismisses Live-Fire Visit Reports as Factually Wrong ｜ Latest ）
