Taiwan is accelerating preparations for a possible attack by China, drawing heavily on lessons from Russia's invasion of Ukraine to reshape its armed forces, officials and military analysts say. Taipei has made asymmetric warfare, the modernisation of civilian infrastructure and the diversification of international alliances its top defence priorities.
Some politicians in Taipei, capital of the partially recognised Republic of China, believe the risk of armed conflict between the "two Chinas" is now the highest it has been in 50 years. Chinese Communist Party documents have increasingly dropped the word "peaceful" from references to reunification with Taiwan, using the word "reunification" alone. The US Central Intelligence Agency has said Chinese leader Xi Jinping has ordered the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to be ready for a possible use of force against Taiwan by 2027.
Since 2022-2024, PLA activity around Taiwan has become routine, with Beijing regularly holding drills simulating a full blockade of the island, particularly after visits by senior foreign officials or the inauguration of Taiwanese leaders. Chinese aircraft and ships cross the so-called median line of the Taiwan Strait, a decades-old unofficial buffer zone, almost daily, while the number of Chinese incursions into Taiwan's air defence identification zone has risen sharply, repeatedly forcing Taipei to scramble fighter jets.
China and Taiwan
China, which controls mainland China, Hong Kong and Macao, has a population of more than 1.408 billion. Taiwan, officially the Republic of China, has just over 23 million people. Beijing does not recognise Taiwan's sovereignty and firmly opposes its international recognition as a separate state, insisting on a "one China principle" under which the mainland and Taiwan form a single sovereign entity. The furthest Beijing has offered to go is a "one country, two systems" model granting Taiwan autonomy if it joined the PRC, on the template used for Hong Kong and Macao. Nearly all of Taiwan's main parties reject this, especially since a crackdown on rights and freedoms in Hong Kong.
Unlike communist China, Taiwan has long been a democracy with a semi-presidential system and universal suffrage. It has the world's 18th-largest economy, and its high-tech industry, above all semiconductor manufacturing, is critical to the global economy: the island accounts for about 60% of world semiconductor production and more than 90% of the most advanced chips.
Lessons from Ukraine's war
Studying Ukraine's fight against Russia's numerically larger forces, Taiwan's leadership has identified key vulnerabilities in conventional armies and is fast-tracking new defence doctrines to deter China.
Drawing on Ukraine's experience, Taiwan is pursuing a so-called "Hellscape" strategy, planning to use thousands of naval and aerial drones to repel a potential invasion. The New York Times has reported that the strategy requires a fundamental restructuring of military structure and tactics, along with new electronic-warfare integration and troop training. Taiwan is also scaling up drone production, aiming to manufacture 100,000 unmanned aircraft a month by 2030 and become a key supplier of drone components to democracies. Taiwan's Ministry of National Defence wants the military to purchase more than 210,000 aerial and maritime drones. The island has also created a new Littoral Combat Command, combining drones, mobile missile systems and artillery into a single coastal defence system.
The 'Taiwan Shield' and asymmetric weapons
Taiwan is also trying to fix the vulnerability of expensive air defences to swarms of cheap drones. The war in Ukraine showed how massed cheap kamikaze-drone attacks can drain stocks of costly, scarce surface-to-air missiles. To avoid rapidly depleting its stock of American Patriot systems, Taiwan is developing a layered air-defence system called the "Taiwan Shield," or T-Dome, based on mass purchases and domestic production of inexpensive anti-aircraft artillery, short-range mobile surface-to-air missiles and electronic-warfare equipment meant to absorb the brunt of enemy drone swarms.
Taiwan's military has fully embraced the decisive role of asymmetric weapons, formally abandoning the goal of matching China ship for ship and buying large warships or heavy tanks that could become easy targets in the first hours of a conflict. Funds are instead going toward thousands of mobile, dispersed and camouflaged weapons, chiefly Harpoon anti-ship missiles, portable Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and Javelin anti-tank systems, intended to inflict unacceptable losses on a Chinese landing fleet before it reaches the coast.
Stockpiling and guarding against a 'decapitation' strike
Taiwan has overhauled its logistics strategy over fears of a total supply cutoff. Unlike Ukraine, which has long land borders with NATO countries and can receive a steady flow of Western aid, Taiwan is an isolated island. In a full-scale conflict, China would most likely try to impose a tight naval and air blockade, making wartime resupply extremely difficult. Taiwan has therefore adopted a "pre-stockpiling" approach, building up critical supplies, from fuel and food to medicine and artillery ammunition, in advance and storing them in protected, including underground, facilities before any fighting begins.
Having closely studied the failure of Russia's initial plan to swiftly seize Kyiv and eliminate or remove Ukraine's leadership, Taipei has strengthened its military counterintelligence and modernised security around the government quarter. Taiwan's intelligence services have also drawn up strict crisis protocols to respond to a potential "fifth column" or sabotage groups at the first signs of a genuine military threat, aimed at preventing internal destabilisation.
Drone funding fight and exports
About 80 political parties and groups operate in Taiwan, but the two dominant forces are the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, which favours declaring Taiwan an independent state under the name "Republic of Taiwan," and the historic Kuomintang, which helped found the unrecognised Republic of China on the island in 1949 and still favours eventual reunification of China under Taiwanese leadership. The two parties are bitter rivals and, while both back expanding drone production, they disagree on the details.
Taiwan's government recently proposed spending $6.5 billion over five years to buy drones, mostly foreign-made. The opposition, which holds a majority in parliament, rejected the plan, saying it could encourage corruption and wasteful spending. The Kuomintang put forward its own plan to spend $7.4 billion on drones over six years, requiring the domestically produced share to gradually increase.
While lawmakers argue over funding, Taiwanese and American drone makers have already begun competing for potential orders. Last month, Taiwanese manufacturer Thunder Tiger and US defence company Shield AI held demonstration tests in Taiwan of two different maritime drone models capable of reconnaissance and striking enemy ships. According to Taiwan's Ministry of Economic Affairs, the island exported drones worth more than $115 million in the first three months of 2026 alone, more than in all of 2025. The Czech Republic was the top destination, though research shows a significant share of the drones ultimately end up on the front line in Ukraine.
Recent military exercises
Taiwan's annual Han Kuang exercises, held from 5 to 14 August 2026, along with government statements, show the island has broadly shifted in 2026 from classic defence toward a doctrine of "total resistance." The government has announced a 16% increase in defence spending, aiming to raise it to 3.3% of GDP under its defence strategy and to 5% of GDP by 2030, to reduce the burden on allies and show the island's readiness to defend itself.
The exercises rehearsed scenarios of a full maritime and air isolation of the island by China. Taiwanese forces practised moving weapons production to hidden facilities and converting civilian factories to military production. The drills, which included a simulated emergency evacuation of the country's leadership, also tested underground hospital operations and the protection of telecommunications cables.
During separate Wan An exercises, held from 7 to 13 August 2026, Taiwanese telecom operators deliberately slowed 4G and 5G mobile internet for the first time to test infrastructure resilience under a real invasion or blockade scenario, and even simulated a complete network shutdown modelling damage to undersea cables by Chinese forces. To create backup communication channels, Taiwan is urgently deploying a low-earth-orbit satellite network.
Taiwan's armed forces are also studying lessons from the United States' war with Iran, and are moving, following the model of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), toward a command structure in which local commanders can act independently without waiting for orders from central headquarters, which Beijing might try to destroy in the first hours of a conflict. In 2008 the IRGC split into 31 autonomous provincial commands, each holding its own stocks of missiles, drones and supplies, so that if the supreme command in Tehran were destroyed, local commanders could keep fighting under pre-set protocols. Taiwan's military is now actively adapting this concept of resilience despite loss of contact with the centre.
Three ways China could blockade Taiwan
US and Taiwanese military analysts in 2026 have identified three main scenarios under which China could try to blockade the island, each meant to strangle Taiwan's economy and force its capitulation without a bloody, risky amphibious invasion.
The first is a soft "grey zone" blockade, one of the most likely initial escalation scenarios, which Beijing could present not as an invasion but as a "law enforcement operation" in waters it claims as its own. Chinese maritime police and coast guard vessels could declare the waters around Taiwan a customs-control zone, requiring merchant ships bound for the island to pre-register on Chinese digital platforms, while selectively stopping, inspecting and detaining civilian vessels carrying cargo for Taiwan as the Chinese navy stood by.
The goal would be to drive up insurance costs for shipowners, make the region dangerous for commercial shipping, and trigger economic panic that pushes foreign companies to stop trading with Taiwan.
The second scenario is a full classic naval and air blockade, one Beijing regularly rehearses during its largest exercises. China would declare no-fly zones over Taiwan and close surrounding waters to shipping. PLA ships would physically block access to the key ports of Kaohsiung in the south and Keelung in the north, Chinese submarines would patrol Taiwan's deep-water east coast, and Chinese aircraft and missile forces would target any ship or plane crossing the blockade perimeter. China could also deploy its "maritime militia," thousands of fishing vessels, to form "floating walls" along sea routes around the island.
This would aim to fully cut off Taiwan's energy supply. The island critically depends on imported liquefied natural gas, of which a blockade would leave only a few weeks' reserve, as well as on food imports.
The third scenario is a digital and information blockade, effectively cutting Taiwan off from the world, which Beijing would most likely deploy alongside a naval blockade to disorient the population and paralyse the island's administration. Chinese submarines or other vessels could damage the deep-sea internet cables connecting Taiwan to the rest of the world, while massed cyberattacks hit satellite infrastructure and mobile network nodes. The aim would be to cut Taiwan's leadership off from allies, above all the United States and Japan, and leave the population without access to information, causing internal chaos and paralysing the banking system.
Relying on the US and Japan
Taiwan is counting on help from its military and political partners, but its expectations have grown more pragmatic, shifting toward a concept of "burden sharing." The United States, which for decades has been Taiwan's principal external security partner and arms supplier, remains its key military and political partner.
Taiwanese officials repeatedly stressed in 2026 that military cooperation between Taipei and Washington is much closer than many think, extending well beyond arms sales to include coast guard cooperation and intelligence sharing. Amid statements by American politicians that the era of subsidising the defence of wealthy partners should end, Taiwan is seeking to buy more weapons with its own funds to improve its chances of direct US support if China attacks.
Japan's 2026 Defence White Paper, the Japanese Ministry of Defence's annual report assessing the regional military and political situation and the state, activities and tasks of Japan's Self-Defense Forces, again named China as its "primary strategic challenge." Tokyo is investing heavily in the procurement and production of long-range missiles and stresses that stability around Taiwan is critical to Japan's security and international security more broadly. Taiwan understands Japan is unlikely to send ground troops in a crisis, but is counting on the role of Japan's navy and air force, as well as US bases on Okinawa, in deterring a potential Chinese blockade.
Many international analysts agree that Taiwan has recognised international help will only prove decisive if the island can demonstrate it is able to hold out on its own during the first weeks or months of a conflict. It is that resilience that Taipei's current reforms are designed to build.
