Taiwan continues to pour billions into prestige weapons platforms that would likely be wiped out in the opening hours of a Chinese attack, leaving the island without the asymmetric capabilities it actually needs to survive an invasion.

Stacie Pettyjohn and Molly Campbell of the Center for a New American Security laid out the problem in a new report published by War on the Rocks, "Hvylya" reports.

The numbers are stark. Taiwan's $16 billion indigenously developed diesel submarine program and its fleet of fourth-generation F-16 fighters represent exactly the kind of expensive, easy-to-find targets that China's massive missile force could eliminate quickly. "Many of these systems have a role in peacetime deterrence," Pettyjohn and Campbell wrote, but "they would be quickly eliminated by China's massive missile arsenal during a shooting war."

For nearly two decades, defense analysts have urged Taiwan to adopt a so-called porcupine strategy - deploying large numbers of cheap, mobile weapons like cruise missiles, mines, and fast missile boats. The idea is to make the island too painful to swallow rather than trying to match China's conventional military. Taiwan accepted the logic in theory but failed to follow through. Senior military leaders remain wedded to sophisticated weapons and the idea of punishing counterattacks against the Chinese mainland.

Senior officials in the Trump administration have publicly criticized what they called Taipei's "alarming lack of urgency in dramatically strengthening its defenses." Taiwan's defense spending, force structure, and operational planning remain inadequate for the scale of the Chinese threat, the CNAS authors argued.

Even the asymmetric weapons Taiwan has acquired fall short. The current porcupine strategy relies on expensive anti-ship missiles unlikely to be procured in sufficient numbers to counter a numerically superior People's Liberation Army. The deeper problem, Pettyjohn and Campbell wrote, is strategic: Taiwan lacks a coherent theory of victory that integrates its capabilities into a unified approach to defeating an invasion.

Earlier, "Hvylya" wrote about how Ukraine's rapidly expanding drone fleet is reshaping the battlefield in ways that Russia struggles to counter.