A Porcupine on Paper, or a Real One? The Execution Gap in Taiwan's Asymmetric Warfare Capability

Start with the good news, because this part is real, and more concrete than one might expect.

In November 2025, Taiwan unveiled a special defense budget of roughly US$40 billion (NT$1.25 trillion), spanning 2026 through 2033 ^[2]. Where is the money going? The main items include a full-island air-defense system called "T-Dome," area-denial weapons, large numbers of drones and uncrewed vessels, and an AI-enabled command-and-control system.

More concretely still, the armed forces' drone orders have already been placed. Under the plan, the Ministry of National Defense will procure a total of 48,750 domestically made drones in two phases — 11,270 units in 2026 and 37,480 units in 2027 — across five models, with a hard requirement: every one of them must be manufactured in Taiwan, and the use of Chinese-made components is strictly banned ^[10][6]. On the maritime side, CSBC (Taiwan's state shipbuilder) has also rolled out a military-grade uncrewed vessel called "Endeavor Manta," with Taiwan's navy finally beginning to seriously develop uncrewed maritime vehicles ^[8]; on land, American-made M142 HIMARS multiple rocket launchers arrived in October 2024, and paired with ATACMS missiles, they could in theory strike landing-staging areas around Xiamen and Quanzhou on the other side of the strait.

Even more attention has gone to the "Hellscape" concept put forward by the American think tank CNAS — the idea that once the PLA attempts to cross the strait, Taiwan would use massive numbers of drones and uncrewed vessels to create a "hellscape" in the Taiwan Strait, pinning down the landing fleet in the water and buying time ^[3]. Paired with the boom in exports of Taiwan's domestically made drones (see "The European Warships Are Coming"), a "drone porcupine" seems to be emerging.

The porcupine strategy is not an armchair theory — it has a bloody, living case study: Ukraine.

The lesson from the Russia-Ukraine war that has most upended conventional military wisdom is that "cheap small things can pierce expensive big things": a suicide drone costing a few hundred dollars can destroy a main battle tank worth millions of dollars; uncrewed surface vessels have let Ukraine push back Russia's Black Sea Fleet with almost no navy of its own. This is exactly a victory of "large numbers of cheap things" over "a small number of expensive things," and it is exactly the inspiration behind Taiwan's porcupine strategy.

But Ukraine also taught Taiwan another lesson, and a harder one: drone warfare is a war of "rapid iteration" attrition. A drone that works today might be defeated by electronic jamming next month; what the front line needs is capacity that can "keep going, at scale, and update quickly," not a one-time import purchase that runs out once it's used up. This has a double meaning for Taiwan: on one hand, it proves the porcupine approach is correct; on the other, it also means that what Taiwan needs is not just "buying a batch of drones," but "cultivating a drone industry capable of continuous updating and mass production." This is also why building up the domestic industry matters more than simply buying from the United States.

The porcupine's quills need someone to make them. Taiwan is filling in this piece too.

Since the Russia-Ukraine war began in 2022, the government has pushed a "drone national team," establishing a research and production center in Chiayi to steer commercial drone manufacturing capacity toward military use. This national team has now expanded to more than 160 companies, with a target of reaching monthly production of 15,000 units and annual output value above NT$30 billion by 2028 ^[5][7]. For a country that had almost no military drone industry to speak of, this is an extremely fast start.

But there is a critical gap here that is easily papered over by optimism: "able to export" is not the same as "already deployed in large numbers by our own forces." Taiwan's drone industry is thriving on exports (especially exports tied to Europe's "de-China" supply-chain push), and that proves its manufacturing capacity and technology; but only once that mass-production capacity is genuinely connected to Taiwan's own forces' requirement specifications, operational organization and logistics system will those quills actually be growing on the porcupine's own body. Being able to sell to others and actually going into battle yourself are two different things.

Here the brakes have to be applied. The critics' words may sting, but they are grounded: Taiwan's asymmetric transformation has execution lagging behind the slogans.

Research points to Taiwan displaying "a worrying lack of urgency"; a conservative service culture still favors procuring a small number of large, expensive, impressive-looking platforms (warships, fighter jets) rather than large numbers of cheap things that can wear down an adversary ^[1]. There is a deeper problem still, in the "kill chain": some analysis points out that Taiwan still leans toward traditional drone use, lacking the ability to rapidly link together "detect–fix–decide–strike," particularly against mobile missile launchers, where it lacks sustained space- and air-based reconnaissance and a smooth chain from detection to strike authorization ^[1]. So, money being in place does not mean the right things have been bought, the right processes have been strung together, or the troops have been well trained. The American think tank Heritage has gone further, criticizing Taiwan's purely defensive strategy as expensive and lacking a "second-strike" counter-deterrent ^[9].

"A lack of urgency" sounds abstract, but it becomes very concrete once you get down to reality: it can mean a drone budget item getting pushed to the back of the line because a service branch feels it "isn't impressive enough, doesn't look like a proper military"; it can mean a procurement process that still uses the drawn-out specifications and timelines built for buying large warships to procure drones that are supposed to iterate rapidly; and it can mean troop training and organization that still hasn't truly made "one drone per infantryman" a standard-issue item at the squad level. These institutional habits cannot be changed just by reallocating a budget line — they need to be loosened at the root, in military culture — and that is often harder than drafting a budget.

Here there is a controversy that Taiwan especially needs to think through for itself, and it sits inside that budget's marquee item: T-Dome.

T-Dome (Taiwan's Shield) is the multi-layered air-defense system that Lai Ching-te put forward in October 2025, modeled on Israel's "Iron Dome," intended to intercept a first Chinese strike. But think tanks' doubts are sharp: Australia's Lowy Institute states bluntly that "Taiwan's Dome won't survive a Chinese attack" — because against a PLA saturation, multi-domain attack, a fixed air-defense system has an extremely high interception cost and can easily be overwhelmed by sheer numbers ^[4]. The more pointed question is: is T-Dome actually a "political tool" or an "operational solution"? It is an expensive, impressive-looking, large system that can be shown off both at home and abroad — and that is precisely the kind of "big and expensive" that the "porcupine strategy" is supposed to guard against.

If T-Dome ends up crowding out resources meant for "large numbers of cheap things," then Taiwan would in effect be calling itself a porcupine with one hand while pouring money back into traditional large platforms with the other. This really comes down to: Taiwan needs to think clearly about whether T-Dome is the porcupine's shield, or something that eats the porcupine's quills.

And the most regrettable thing is what happened this past year in the Legislative Yuan.

As described in "5% of Defense," under the deadlock of a ruling party facing an opposition majority, that asymmetric special budget was heavily cut through the wrangling between the ruling and opposition camps; and according to reporting, the shrunken version at one point excluded "domestic production" items and narrowed procurement to purchases from the United States, directly hitting the originally planned, and considerably valuable, domestic drone and uncrewed-vessel programs ^[11].

This is an almost darkly comic situation: Taiwan finally managed to build up a national drone team, planting the porcupine's quills one by one — only to potentially cut off, with its own hand, the very quills still growing, because of domestic political calculation. The adversary doesn't even need to lift a finger — Taiwan's own internal friction has already weakened its asymmetric warfare capability first. Politics's knife can sometimes wound the porcupine worse than the enemy's knife.

Here, too, an easily skipped-over controversy should be stated honestly. Red Team East reminds us: "Hellscape" is a framework from an American think tank, and it carries the implicit assumption that Taiwan should serve as the "front line of an attritional war" — Taiwan should ask whether this actually fully serves its own interests, rather than accepting it wholesale. Red Team West counters: whoever proposed the framework, "large numbers of cheap things" really is the most practical path of survival for a small country against a large one, and Taiwan's problem is not whether to do it, but that it is moving too slowly.

The overlap between the two is this: the direction is right, but Taiwan has to fill in the content with its own interests, and do it fast. The porcupine strategy is not Washington's homework assignment — it is Taiwan's own path to survival, but that path has to be walked by Taiwan itself, fast enough and solidly enough.

There is another layer that is easily overlooked: real asymmetry extends to the whole of society.

A porcupine's quills don't grow only on its military. They include: civilian disaster-response and rescue capability (see the Kuma Academy-style civil defense mentioned in "Social Psychology"), the resilience of critical infrastructure (the power grid, undersea cables, food, energy), and a society that "can hold up even under blockade." China's ideal script is "a swift, decisive fight, victory without battle"; and Taiwan's whole-of-society resilience is exactly what would make that script fail — once the adversary realizes that even a successful first strike still leaves it facing a society that cannot be crushed, thrown into chaos, or worn down, the word "worthwhile" disappears from its calculations.

The highest form of the porcupine strategy is not measured by how many drones are bought, but by turning the whole of Taiwan — military, industry, society — into quill after quill that is hard to pull out. Weapons are the hardware; will and resilience are the software that lets the hardware actually deliver deterrence.

The state/Ministry of National Defense: Accelerate turning the special budget into real spending on "large numbers of cheap things" (drones, uncrewed vessels, mobile missiles, smart sea mines), and fill in the weakest link, the "kill chain" — the fast chain from sensing to authorization to strike. At the same time, reverse the procurement habit of "favoring large, expensive platforms," think clearly about where T-Dome fits relative to asymmetric warfare, and don't let political crowding-out cut domestic production items; manpower and training are two hard bones that also need to be chewed through. And don't forget the "balance of offense and defense": a purely defensive posture is costly and hard to deter with alone, while a modest "source-strike" capability (such as HIMARS paired with ATACMS, able to reach staging areas and logistics nodes for a landing on the other side) can make an adversary calculate a cost before it even launches an attack — this is the key piece that upgrades deterrence from "blocking the blow" to "making the adversary hesitate before it swings."

The defense-technology and drone industry: Domestically made drones (building on European orders) are a civil-military dual-use opportunity, but the mass-production capacity built for exports needs to be connected to the requirements and specifications of Taiwan's own forces — letting "Made in Taiwan" arm Taiwan itself first. What industry fears most is not a lack of orders, but policy flip-flopping and a budget that swings between being funded and being cut, leaving hard-won production capacity with nowhere to go.

SMEs and society: Asymmetric warfare is not just about military procurement — it also includes whole-of-society civil-defense resilience (see "Social Psychology"). Localizing the defense supply chain is an opportunity for small and medium-sized manufacturers to break in; and every citizen trained in civil defense, every more resilient supply chain, is one more quill on the porcupine's body.

A porcupine is safe not because it has one or two especially large quills, but because it is covered all over in quills, dense and numerous, too many to pull out one by one. Taiwan's asymmetric warfare capability has its strategy worked out, its budget appropriated, and its orders even placed — what remains is the hardest, yet most critical, step: growing that full body of quills quickly and for real, rather than letting them be dulled and cut away, one by one, in the inertia of service culture, the controversy over T-Dome, and the political fighting in the Legislative Yuan. Otherwise, a porcupine on paper will scare off no one. And growing that full body of quills quickly and for real is not only the Ministry of National Defense's job — it is a question of whether this society, Taiwan, is willing to grow it together, with urgency, with resilience, and with a resolve not held hostage by political infighting.