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Taipei is said to be interested in US drones. They could play a decisive role in the event of a conflict with China and provide deterrence.
Taipei – Taiwan wants to buy US-made drones that will operate on the battlefield from Nagorno-Karabakh to the Ukraine have become one of the most important weapons and hover over the fighting for hours before being used.
Chinese military exercises almost every day: Taiwan is now relying on defense
Taiwan has faced Chinese military exercises almost daily for the past three years. In the process, People’s Liberation Army fighter jets flooded the island’s air defense zone and virtually obliterated the median line of the Taiwan Strait. Now Taiwan is said to be coveting both variants of the AeroVironment Switchblade drone, according to four people familiar with the situation.
The Switchblade drone, which in its smallest form fits in a backpack and also has a much larger variant that can be used to disable tanks and armored vehicles, costs about $50,000 per drone, according to the manufacturer.
The U.S. Army has halted purchases of the smaller variant, the Switchblade 300 – but the new supplemental budget passed by Congress provides the Defense Department with about $72 million to purchase several hundred of the larger variant, the Switchblade 600. available. The Army is expected to begin using the drones next year.
Taiwan’s interest in the U.S.-made drones is a growing sign that Taipei is bowing to U.S. urging — dating back to the Trump administration — and focusing on purchasing munitions that will deter or deter a Chinese invasion of the island could ward off.
“This is all part of the American push for asymmetry,” said Ivan Kanapathy, a non-resident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former National Security Council official during the Trump administration. “We told them, ‘You’re going to have to buy a lot more ammunition.'”
Early loitering ammunition dates back to the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, but it didn’t really come into vogue until the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. There, Israeli loitering ammunition supported a lightning-fast Azerbaijani ground offensive that led to a less technically proficient Armenian military fighting in the open.
Operation in Ukraine: 1100 Switchblades in the first days of the Russian invasion
The AeroVironment Switchblade is the US version. Manufactured in California and Utah, the Switchblade fires from a tube and has been widely used by the Ukrainian military. Since the first days of the Russian invasion, about 1,100 American-made Switchblades have been delivered to Ukraine.
- This article is available for the first time in German – the magazine first published it on May 8, 2024 Foreign policy.
As a countermeasure, the Kremlin has manufactured the Lancet drone and supplemented it with Shahed drones from Iran, which use satellite navigation instead of a radiation seeker.
Possible uses of drones have been further developed: But so have their jammers
All of these variants have proven themselves on the battlefield and are now almost ubiquitous – although pocket-sized jammers that can disable them are now almost as ubiquitous.
Their possible uses have also evolved. For years, China has been using the so-called Harpy, an ammunition made in Israel that is intended to disable enemy radars. The second generation of this weapon, known as “Harop,” was Azerbaijan’s weapon of choice in the 2020 war.
And over time, China’s advantage in the skies has only grown, as Chinese strategists have come to believe the weapon can be effective in a modern war of attrition. Sky News recently reported that China now has tens of thousands of drone variants. The Taiwanese have around four types of drones of their own.
But Taiwanese officials increasingly believe the U.S.-made suicide drones – which are only good for one shot – could effectively sink Chinese ships or hit Chinese tanks and vehicles. That’s according to people familiar with Taiwan’s interest in the drones, who spoke on condition of anonymity about an impending military sale.
Requests from Taiwan to Defense Ministry and Pentagon
Taiwan has submitted a request to the defense ministry for a drone that would match the Switchblade 300, although people familiar with the request said AeroVironment was not specifically named.
Taiwan has submitted a second request to the Pentagon for a larger drone variant, with Anduril’s Switchblade 600 and Altius-600 competing. The latter can hover over a target for four hours, longer than AeroVironment’s model.
Opinions rejected: Wall of silence
A spokesman for the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States, Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington, declined to comment, citing its practice of not discussing details of defense cooperation with the United States.
In an email, Lisa Lawrence, a Defense Department spokeswoman, said the agency would not comment on planned defense sales until they were communicated to Congress. Anduril declined to comment, and AeroVironment did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
3,000 military drones in Taiwan are mandatory
The Biden administration has in recent years begun to close the $19 billion backlog in military sales to Taiwan by approving 13 congressional notifications for arms sales since 2021. But the deals focused almost exclusively on items on the Pentagon’s Integrated Capabilities List, a list of low-cost weapons that mostly includes ammunition, and on maintaining the weapons Taiwan already possesses.
To the author
Jack Detsch is a Pentagon and national security reporter at Foreign Policy. Twitter (X): @JackDetsch
Taiwan’s outgoing President Tsai Ing-wen has made it mandatory to deploy more than 3,000 military drones on the island. About 50 Taiwanese research teams are bidding for government contracts worth more than $300 million. Much of this money is used domestically.
These investments have already had an impact. Taiwanese companies have unveiled their own home-made drone munitions that can hit targets up to 93 miles away. Taiwan has also created a quasi-governmental agency designed to function similarly to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a defense technology incubator credited at least in part with modern inventions such as GPS and the Internet.
Long-term goal: Build your own weapons, stop buying US weapons
Heino Klinck, a former U.S. deputy defense secretary, said Taiwan’s long-term goal is to build weapons that are easily expendable and can be produced on the island, not just buy fancy U.S. weapons. “Taiwanese need to be selective in their investments,” Klinck said. “They must be able to cope with the new normal that the Chinese have established and continue to establish almost daily.”
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on May 8, 2024 in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com“ was published – as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.
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