TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Taiwan's traditional air defense strategy, modeled after Israel and the US, falls short against China's overwhelming missile and drone salvos across a compressed island battlespace lacking strategic depth, according to a Taiwanese defense expert.
In a commentary for National Defense Magazine on Friday, defense expert Holmes Liao (廖宏祥) said Ukraine's battlefield innovations offer Taiwan a more affordable path via electronic warfare and offensive targeting to disrupt Beijing's precision strikes and shift the cost-exchange ratio in its favor.
Liao has over 35 years of experience in US aerospace and defense. He is a former faculty member of the Taiwan War College and founded Taiwan Advocacy to advance Taiwan’s geopolitical priorities on the international stage.
He said that Taiwan confronts a threat environment unlike Israel's compact rocket defenses or the US’ buffered continental reach, facing immediate access by Chinese air, naval and rocket forces. Meanwhile, the People's Liberation Army fields hundreds of short-range ballistic missiles alongside cheaper rocket systems.
Cheap drones force Taiwan to expend expensive Patriot or indigenous Sky Bow interceptors, risking exhaustion before saturation, as shown by analysis of the nation’s proposed “porcupine” strategy.
Liao observed that Ukraine has demonstrated that jamming GPS signals diverts Russian drones and Kinzhal missiles. Taiwan should deploy similar regional electronic warfare architectures to spoof China's BeiDou system, degrading data links for coordinated salvos while shielding its own sensors.
Taiwan also requires space-based and airborne intelligence, including synthetic aperture radar from US commercial providers, to expose coastal strike assets for timely “find-fix-finish” operations.
Meanwhile, Liao argued, resilience demands distributed radars, decoys, mobile guns and short-range interceptors to preserve Patriots and Sky Bow for high-end threats, alongside rapid software updates for electromagnetic adaptation. The core shift rejects platform-centric buying for system disruption — degrading sensing, decisions and strikes at scale.
