TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Kitsch Liao (廖彥棻), associate director of the Atlantic Council’s Global China Hub, and Fu S. Mei (梅復興), director of the Taiwan Security Analysis Center, urged Taiwan to rethink its approach to maintaining maritime domain awareness.
Liao and Mei argued in a US Naval Institute article that a contractor-owned, contractor-operated (COCO) fixed-wing airborne intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) program paired with aircraft equipped with military sensors will significantly strengthen Taiwan’s maritime domain awareness.
“Taiwan needs to see into its waters clearly enough to detect maritime infiltration and respond before a gray zone action becomes a fait accompli,” they said. However, no such program currently exists.
Strengthening maritime domain awareness
Under a COCO framework, the contractor is responsible for airframe ownership, sensor procurement, aircrew certification, and operation and maintenance, they said. The government only needs to pay a service fee and issue mission orders.
No new units, major spending, or training programs are required, and operations could start within months after signing a contract, Liao and Mei said. Taiwan’s Navy has already used contractor-operated systems for target towing for years, and the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) also relies on contractors for parts of its shore-based surveillance network. “The intellectual framework is therefore familiar, but the Navy must be willing to apply it at the scale the (maritime domain awareness) requirement demands,” they said.
In addition to COCO operations, Taiwan requires fixed-wing maritime patrol aircraft equipped with a “low-SWaP (size, weight, and power) synthetic aperture radar with Maritime Moving Target Indication capability” that can detect and track both large ships and small boats that do not broadcast their location. The system must also be able to detect and track vessels in all weather and at night, the researchers said.
The aircraft should also be equipped with electro-optical and infrared sensors so targets can be visually identified, Liao and Mei said. There also needs to be onboard data processing, a secure communications link, and a built-in command-and-control interface that can connect directly to Taiwan’s network for sharing and using the information, they added.
Clear advantages
Liao and Mei said the COCO framework helps strengthen whole-of-society defense by keeping experienced Taiwanese military veterans and retirees involved. Aviation contractors hire qualified former military aircrews, allowing them to maintain their skills and stay operationally ready even outside official military personnel limits, they said.
The COCO model is already proving effective, the researchers said. In Ukraine, private defense companies working under authorization from Ukraine’s defense ministry and integrated into its air force have already intercepted Russian drones, including Shahed and Zala types, they said.
Although the CGA is now responsible for handling China’s gray-zone operations, it lacks sufficient capacity to do so, they said. Taiwan’s Navy and Air Force face the same problem. Every hour an F-16 or MQ-9 drone is used to monitor routine gray-zone activity is an hour that aircraft cannot be used for more important intelligence and surveillance missions.
“By applying continuous pressure without sparking armed conflict, China forces Taiwan’s most crucial military assets into unsustainable attrition,” Liao and Mei said.
Chinese gray-zone threats
Over the past two years, the CGA has increased the number of ships it monitors from about 300 to around 1,900 based on intelligence on China’s gray-zone activities, according to the researchers. However, identifying these ships does not mean they can all be effectively tracked.
Liao and Mei pointed out that between 128 and 209 Chinese-flagged fishing vessels show “state-directed behavior patterns.” These ships turn off their tracking systems an average of 998 times per year each, change their registered names over 1,300 times annually, and tend to gather in areas used for People’s Liberation Army Navy exercises rather than in normal fishing zones, they said.
During China’s “Justice Mission 2025” military exercise in December, there were at least 130 sorties and 32 vessels on the first day, Liao and Mei said. Separately, on Christmas Day, approximately 2,000 maritime militia vessels gathered in waters northeast of Taiwan, forming a 466-kilometer L-shape to simulate cutting off foreign shipping lanes.
Liao and Mei called these activities “a structured probing campaign to map Taiwan’s maritime response latencies and identify when surveillance coverage collapses.”
The CGA currently relies on shore-based radar, patrol vessels with automatic identification system (AIS) receivers, and an aerial drone program, Liao and Mei said. However, Taiwan’s National Audit Office has identified multiple issues in the drone program, including poorly trained operators, inability to operate in bad weather, and readiness levels below operational needs.
Urgent changes needed
The researchers said the use of the SeaVision platform is a step in the right direction, but its data aggregation and track-blending process introduces delays. They cited defense analysts tracking Taiwan’s maritime domain awareness efforts as saying that key irregularities, such as ships changing their AIS identity while at sea, are usually only discovered after they happen.
By the time analysts detect that a vessel has gone dark, it is already too late to respond.
Taiwan officials and lawmakers already acknowledge Taiwan’s maritime domain awareness challenges and are calling for changes, Liao and Mei said.
Wang Ting-yu (王定宇), convener of the Legislative Yuan Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, has said the CGA lacks sufficient equipment to close the maritime awareness gap. Meanwhile, Ocean Affairs Council Minister Kuan Bi-ling (管碧玲) has said that both crewed and uncrewed systems are needed.
“A COCO fixed-wing ISR program is a bridge capability Taiwan can deploy within months, without new formations, capital investment, or long procurement lead times,” Liao and Mei said. Aircraft equipped with military-grade sensors can provide the continuous, expansive surveillance Taiwan requires, they added.
