Taiwan Scrambles to Fix Holes in Its Drone Defenses

From the trenches of Ukraine to the missile exchanges between Iran and Israel, drones have proven themselves the weapon that lets a weaker force punch above its weight, and Taiwan's own Han Kuang 42 exercise this year treated drone warfare as a central pillar of the drill. Yet the island's legislature still has not agreed on a draft law governing unmanned vehicles, and behind the scenes, Taiwan's military is confronting an uncomfortable truth: its offensive drone programs have advanced quickly, but its ability to shoot enemy drones out of the sky has not kept pace, according to sources with knowledge of the military's internal deliberations.

The clearest sign of that gap is the unraveling of a contract with Chuang Wei Lai Technology, a domestic firm that won an Army bid in early 2025 to build a fixed counter drone system. After delivering the equipment, the company failed three consecutive rounds of performance testing and retesting, and the military has now moved to terminate the contract altogether, a setback that will delay Taiwan's counter drone timeline and mark a serious blow to homegrown detection and jamming technology.

Taiwan's counter drone architecture is meant to combine fixed installations, vehicle mounted mobile units and portable gear carried by individual soldiers. Chuang Wei Lai's contract covered the fixed layer: 26 systems, worth roughly NT$987.81 million (about US$31 million), destined for outlying islands including Kinmen, Matsu and Penghu as well as sites on Taiwan proper. According to a source familiar with the specifications, the Army had set a demanding but realistic bar drawn from Ukraine's battlefield experience: detect small, low flying drones from six kilometers out, and jam multiple incoming drones from four kilometers away. Chuang Wei Lai's system could not meet that standard, leaving the defense ministry little choice but to scrap the deal and restart the bidding process.

Opposition lawmakers have seized on the company's perceived ties to the ruling party and questioned its technical competence, but one military source argued the criticism misses a broader point: even the United States, European militaries and Israel are still struggling to find efficient ways to counter small suicide drones, so a Taiwanese vendor developing its system without access to real battlefield data was always likely to fall short. If anything, the source said, a system built that way succeeding on the first try would have been the more suspicious outcome. The same source stressed that China is an undisputed drone superpower and that the People's Liberation Army has invested heavily in drone warfare for years, meaning Taiwan's ability to counter PLA drones will directly determine whether its forces can preserve combat strength and sustain a prolonged defense. Reliability, the source added, matters far more than flashy specifications, and choosing the wrong path could prove catastrophic once fighting starts. Counter drone efforts generally split into "soft kill," meaning electronic jamming, and "hard kill," meaning physically destroying a drone, and the source argued Taiwan's forces have leaned too heavily toward soft kill, possibly echoing an American preference that does not necessarily suit a military with far more limited resources.

Military sources describe the underlying problem as a fundamentally lopsided fight. Small attack drones, including first person view models and loitering munitions, are cheap to build and easy to upgrade: a software or firmware tweak can add autonomous navigation, visual targeting or frequency hopping, any of which can defeat a defender's expensive countermeasures. Stopping a drone, by contrast, requires spotting it early enough to tell a small aircraft from a bird, then locating and jamming its signal, a task made harder because most drones today can hop frequencies faster than a jamming system can track them.

A growing share of attack drones no longer need a live signal at all, relying instead on pre-programmed routes or onboard visual recognition, which makes jamming irrelevant. On Ukrainian battlefields, drones tethered to a spool of fiber optic cable transmit control signals with no wireless link whatsoever, rendering electromagnetic jamming completely useless. Attackers can also simply launch enough drones at once to overwhelm a soft kill system's capacity. One Taiwanese military source acknowledged that Chuang Wei Lai's jamming system was tested against a simulated low intensity swarm of ten domestically made drones attacking simultaneously, and failed.

Despite that failure, the setback does not appear to have prompted a rethink of Taiwan's mobile, vehicle mounted counter drone plans. The defense ministry intends to use a special budget spanning 2026 to 2028 to buy 635 portable American made counter drone systems, at a combined cost of roughly NT$9.67 billion, or about US$305 million, averaging NT$15.23 million per unit. The systems will be distributed across the Army, Navy, Air Force and the military's information, communications and electronic warfare command. On paper, the specifications are impressive: a passive detection range of four kilometers, 360 degree coverage, an active jamming range beyond two kilometers, the ability to jam more than ten low altitude targets simultaneously, and the capacity to forcibly take control of an enemy drone.

Sources say the system likely comes from Anduril, the Silicon Valley defense startup that has built a close relationship with Taiwan's military and defense industry. Taiwan has already purchased 291 ALTIUS-600M loitering munitions from Anduril, making a follow-on purchase of the company's counter drone system a natural next step. Anduril's founder, Palmer Luckey, is known for polished marketing, including slick presentations and dramatic footage of AI systems intercepting drone swarms, and the company's Lattice AI battle management platform has drawn interest from Taiwan's military and active testing from the US military alike.

But according to a military source who opposes the purchase, plenty of people inside Taiwan's armed forces have reservations. The system is expensive, its real world effectiveness is uncertain, and it may not be well suited to a Taiwan Strait scenario. Its core jamming and takeover capability depends on matching incoming signals against a real time database of known drone signatures, yet the PLA fields a large and rapidly evolving range of drone models, and there is no guarantee an American database can keep its catalog updated quickly enough. Even if the system detects a PLA drone in time, if it cannot precisely capture the right frequency within a narrow window, the source said, the entire expensive apparatus becomes dead weight.

The math behind the purchase troubles the same source for a different reason: the high unit cost caps how many systems Taiwan can realistically field. Even if military leaders eventually approve billions more in funding to buy another two or three thousand units, the total would still fall short of protecting the island's radar stations, airfields, self propelled artillery and missile launch vehicles. And even taking Anduril's claimed range at face value, four kilometers of detection and two kilometers of active jamming works out to roughly 12.5 square kilometers of coverage per unit, providing only scattered point defense across an entire theater of war. Facing a PLA capable of launching thousands of drones of every size, the source argued, these advanced looking soft kill systems would likely be overwhelmed at the gaps in coverage once a real saturation attack began.

The source was blunt about the implications: spending tens of billions of Taiwan dollars on equipment that looks impressive but underdelivers, then paying tens of billions more in logistics and maintenance, mostly serves to please Washington and enrich American defense contractors, while doing little to build genuine counter drone capability. A separate concern raised by military insiders is philosophical as much as technical: the American approach to drone warfare tends toward spending heavily to chase impressive capabilities, rather than the survival first, kill efficiently logic that has defined Russian and Ukrainian tactics. However capable Anduril's system is marketed to be, it would be rendered useless against fiber optic suicide drones of the kind widely used in Ukraine, since there is no signal to intercept, leaving vehicles and positions that depend on it to watch helplessly as a drone closes in.

There is also a lock in risk. Once Taiwan commits its first major budget to an expensive American system, one source warned, it may be difficult to walk back, effectively steering future purchases of fixed and portable counter drone equipment toward American suppliers as well. That dynamic echoes a broader American effort called Flytrap, which the US military and NATO forces are developing to outfit squads and platoons with personal counter drone kits, including wearable detectors that warn of an approaching suicide drone, backpack or handheld jamming devices, and smart assisted sights. Equipping a single squad with the minimum kit is expected to cost at least US$120,000.

Applying that American benchmark to Taiwan's own force structure produces a striking number. With roughly 100,000 reservists mobilizable in the early phase of a conflict, organized into squads of ten, Taiwan would need about 10,000 squads, pushing the total cost to roughly US$1.2 billion, or about NT$38 billion, and that figure covers only the initial equipment, not replacement batteries, software and hardware maintenance, or spare parts. Sources describe that level of spending as simply incompatible with Taiwan's constrained defense budget.

A retired officer who once commanded a war zone argued that Taiwan's approach to drone combat should follow Ukraine's low cost, survival focused model rather than America's high end, total suppression approach. Buying some expensive American hardware is unavoidable and even useful, both to demonstrate resolve to Washington and to satisfy American defense contractors, and Taiwan has already done so with its MQ-9B Sea Guardian drones and its ALTIUS-600M loitering munitions. But the retired officer argued that logic should stop there. Extending it to portable counter drone equipment meant to protect ordinary soldiers' lives risks trapping Taiwan in what the officer called a reverse asymmetry problem: fielding a small number of expensive counter drone systems against a PLA that can throw large numbers of cheap suicide drones at Taiwan's defenses.

The same officer pointed to how Ukraine and Russia actually fight: both sides mix soft and hard kill methods rather than chasing unrealistic long range jamming capability. Ukraine's handheld Olga counter drone device, for instance, relies on inexpensive commercial sensor chips costing less than US$200 per unit, and simply warns a soldier to take cover once a drone closes to within a few hundred meters. On the hard kill side, radar and optically guided rapid fire guns can protect a wider area, while individual soldiers are commonly issued semi automatic shotguns or low cost net guns, which Ukrainian battlefield experience has shown to be effective against first person view and fiber optic drones. Issuing two or three shotguns or net guns per squad would cost relatively little, the officer said, but could save soldiers' lives and protect valuable equipment at critical moments.

One military source summed up the dilemma facing Taiwan's defense establishment: it makes sense to keep participating in American soft kill development, both to build technical know how and to gain a foothold in the supply chain, but these high end American systems simply are not cost effective for a Taiwan Strait conflict. They might hold up against a handful of drones in a low intensity skirmish, but stand a strong chance of being overwhelmed and rendered useless in a full scale saturation attack. The source argued Taiwan would be better served investing in physical hard kill technology such as high energy lasers, rapid fire close in weapons systems and high power microwave weapons capable of disabling drone swarms, and expressed confidence that Taiwan's research base could develop workable hard kill equipment in a relatively short time. Equipping ordinary soldiers with affordable warning devices and shotguns, the source added, is not technically difficult either. What remains to be seen is whether Taiwan's defense leadership has the clarity, and the willingness to withstand pressure from Washington, to choose that path.

Original Article in Chinese

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