Lessons from Ukraine: How Taiwan plans to counter China in this

Facing a hugely powerful enemy, Taiwan has completed a study of the tactics used by Ukraine against Russia over the past 18 months, in particular its strategic and effective deployment of drones.
Just months after the start of the Russian-Ukrainian war in February 2022, Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen had asked her top officials to find out how Ukrainian forces managed to successfully offset the advantages of a much more powerful enemy.

Tsai finally received a 77-page report that gave a clear answer: Drones.
The report, according to Reuters, said Ukrainian forces, “which were previously considered lacking in air supremacy, cleverly used drones to create their own partial air supremacy.”

Drones used for target reconnaissance and strike
In Ukraine, both sides have relied heavily on a wide range of drones for reconnaissance, surveillance and target strike.
According to military experts, even rudimentary adaptations allowing consumer drones to drop grenades and mortar shells have become deadly threats to tanks, artillery, troops and supply dumps.
Airborne ordnance prowled deep in rear areas on both sides, searching for targets as they loitered before launching deadly attacks.
Frontlines became saturated with drones, which were used to improve battlefield awareness without risking the lives of operators, according to a November report from the Washington-based Center for Strategic & International Studies.
Ukraine and Russia have also deployed counter-drone technology, primarily electronically jamming and radar-controlled anti-drone cannons and missiles, according to the report.

These measures resulted in heavy losses of equipment.
Ukraine is currently losing around 10,000 drones per month, according to a report by the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense research body.
A lesson for foreign militaries studying the conflict is that drones should be plentiful and cheap, military experts say.
Outclassed by China
Although the 77-page report gave a simple answer, the island nation quickly realized that it was woefully behind China when it came to aerial drones.
Taiwan currently has four types of drones and a fleet of a few hundred.”
Across the narrow Taiwan Strait, the People’s Liberation Army has an arsenal of more than 50 different types of drones, estimated to number in the tens of thousands. These drones range from jet-powered long-range surveillance aircraft to small quadcopters deployed by ground troops.
Drone swarms
Unlike Taiwan, China began mass-producing unmanned aircraft long before the Ukraine conflict. The PLA drone development program began in the 1960s, when China developed the Chang Kong-1 (Vast Sky), a radio-controlled unmanned target aircraft adapted from earlier designs supplied by the Soviets.

The impetus for the development of drones comes from above. At the 20th Party Congress in October, Chinese President Xi Jinping said Beijing would accelerate the development of smart, unmanned combat capabilities.
One of the Chinese military’s goals is the potential launch of drone swarms of large numbers of drones powered by artificial intelligence and acting in concert when attacking targets. AI would allow these swarms to fly without humans needing to control every aspect of their flight, threatening to overwhelm a potential enemy.
An arduous task for Taiwan
Clearly outdated, Tsai quickly forged the Drone National Team program, under which Taiwan recruits the islands’ commercial drone manufacturers and aviation and aerospace companies in a joint effort with the military to accelerate the construction of a self-sufficient drone supply chain.
We need to catch up quickly, with thousands of drones, aerospace contractor Max Lo, coordinator of the drone effort, told Reuters.
We do our best to develop drones with commercial specifications for military use. We hope to quickly build our capabilities based on our existing technology so that we can be like Ukraine,” he added.
The goal is to build more than 3,200 military drones by mid-2024. These will include mini-drones weighing less than 2 kg as well as larger surveillance craft with a range of 150 kilometres.

To speed up production, the government for the first time engaged private companies in the research and development phase of an armament program. Thunder Tiger Group, best known for making radio-controlled model aircraft for hobby and commercial purposes, is typical of the type of government-hired companies.
A small drone could blow up a tank worth tens of millions, said Hawk Yang, head of R&D at Thunder Tigers, noting how fast modern warfare is changing with the rise of cheap asymmetric weapons, small arms that can offset expensive large systems.
War in the Gray Zone
As China asserts its claim to Taiwan, it is increasingly deploying drones in a gray area warfare campaign, an almost daily series of daunting air and surface operations it conducts around the island in a bid to test and wear down Taiwan’s defenses.
In late April, the Ministry of Defense in Taipei tracked a Chinese combat drone, the TB-001 Twin-Tailed Scorpion, as the craft completed Taiwan’s first known drone encirclement.
Taiwan’s inability to counter China’s drone arsenal showed up in dramatic fashion in August last year, when the outlying Taiwan-controlled island of Kinmen, less than two kilometers from the Chinese coast at its closest point, was buzzed by Chinese civilian drones.
A video clip first shown on Chinese social media and then picked up by Taiwanese media showed two soldiers throwing rocks at a drone flying near their guard post. Social media posts in Taiwan calling the incident a national humiliation were widely reported in the local press.
(With agency contributions)