The Taiwanese legislature’s curtailing of a defence acquisition budget on 8 May has impeded the government’s attempts at building a porcupine defence system and has damaged the island’s strategic credibility just as President Donald Trump prepares to meet President Xi Jinping.
The legislature was deadlocked for months as lawmakers squabbled acrimoniously over a proposal from Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te to spend about US$40 billion on weaponry up to 2033. This would have been Taiwan’s largest special supplementary defence budget in decades and was aimed at proving to Trump that Taiwan was serious about its own defence. US officials had been pressuring Taiwan to greatly increase its military spending.
Resolution finally came on 8 May, when the legislature, dominated by China-friendly opposition parties, approved spending of only about US$25 billion, mainly on US weapons. The opposition parties opposed the rest of the package mainly because they said it was an opaque plan for massive domestic spending and therefore a recipe for corruption.
Trump is due to meet Xi on 14 and 15 May.
The US$25 billion will cover an order for US arms that Washington announced late last year and has a value exceeding US$11 billion. It includes artillery, drones and Javelin anti-tank missiles. The approved funding will also cover another package for US weapons, reportedly worth at least US$13 billion, that the US government is still working on. Arthur Ding, one of Taiwan’s most respected military analysts and a professor emeritus at National Chengchi University, says he thinks the Trump administration is holding off on approving the latter sale until after Trump speaks with Xi.
The domestic spending lopped off by lawmakers from the China-friendly Kuomintang (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party included money for 200,000 drones.
‘This weakens Taiwan’s defence capabilities,’ Lo Chih-cheng, a senior research fellow with Taiwan’s Institute for National Policy Research and a former legislator with Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), told me. ‘Obviously the military balance is rapidly tilting in favour of the PRC. We are racing against time.’
Wars in both Ukraine and Iran have demonstrated that cheap drones are essential for modern warfare, able to damage and destroy much larger and vastly more expensive weapons and infrastructure. In fact, they are essential for the porcupine strategy, advocated by Lai, by which Taiwan would fend off its much larger neighbour by using small, cheap and numerous mobile weapons, many made domestically.
‘Frankly speaking, this is not good for the development of Taiwan’s indigenous weaponry,’ says Ding. ‘In a conflict with China we have to rely on ourselves …. We don’t know when China will launch operations against us and we have to be prepared for that.’
The strategy would also reduce Taiwanese reliance on the US.
But Taiwan’s opposition politicians are suspicious about large spending on home-grown weaponry. They’ve accused Lai of sharing insufficient information, so there would be plenty of room for corrupt contracts. It’s notable that they have no problem with spending big in the US.
Ding thinks recent scandals may have influenced them. For example, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense in 2022 allegedly awarded a security procurement deal to a tea company that had previously falsified bidding documents, the Taipei Times has reported.
Opposition politicians want to avoid such problems completely, Ding says, adding that they do need to be dealt with if Taiwan is to expand its domestic military industry.
Yet opposition resistance may also be due to an old-fashioned military mindset. Taiwan’s hidebound military is widely criticized for its love of flashy, expensive equipment and resistance to adoption of cheap systems.
Andrew Yang, a former KMT deputy defence minister, is optimistic about the unauthorised US$15 billion. Taiwan’s Cabinet and the Ministry of National Defense just needed to provide more details about the acquisition processes involved for indigenous weaponry. Then the remaining items in the US$40 billion package could be authorised in later budgets.
Lo, on the other hand, blames the opposition’s stance on China’s influence, and emphasises that the diminished budget would reduce US confidence in the DPP’s efforts at improving Taiwan’s military self-reliance.
‘Unfortunately, it will weaken the ruling party’s credibility in beefing up defence and the government’s credibility in conducting foreign policy,’ he says.
A State Department spokesman was quoted by Reuters as saying, ‘While we are encouraged by the passage of this special defense budget after unhelpful stalling, the United States notes that further delays in funding the remaining proposed capabilities are a concession to the Chinese Communist Party.’
