A Defense of Taiwan with Ukrainian Characteristics: Lessons from the war in Ukraine for the Western Pacific

A Defense of Taiwan with Ukrainian Characteristics: Lessons from the war in Ukraine for the Western Pacific

By Riley Bailey and Frederick W. Kagan

October 30, 2024

Executive Summary

The war in Ukraine offers many important lessons for the defense of Taiwan against possible aggression by the People’s Republic of China. The obvious differences between the theaters and the combatants must not be allowed to obscure the important changes in the character of war manifested in Ukraine that will likely apply to almost all future major conflicts. Some lessons will apply directly, since a successful amphibious invasion ends in ground combat. Others require abstraction and major adaptation. But the PRC is studying the war and drawing its own conclusions about how to prepare for future conflict in the western Pacific, and it behooves the United States, Taiwan, and our allies and partners to do the same.

The Ukraine war is demonstrating dramatic changes in the character of war in five main ways:

1) The effectiveness of integrated air/missile defense (IAMD) against even intensive and complex air/missile attack (a phenomenon also visible in Iranian attacks against Israel);

2) The ability of enormous masses of tactical drones—millions of drones used on both sides—to create partially transparent battlefields and constrain combat to positional forms;

3) The ability of integrated drone-missile attacks including both aerial and maritime drones to achieve mission kills and even catastrophic kills of major and minor surface combatants;

4) The expansion of electronic warfare (EW) capabilities to scales and effects never before seen in combat; and

5) The emergence of an extremely rapid battlefield technological-tactical innovation cycle, driven largely by a race between drone and EW technologies, that can see major changes implement along a thousand-kilometer frontline in as few as two-three weeks.

The Air-Missile War

Both Russia and Ukraine have fielded integrated air/missile defense systems in response to increasingly complex attacks combining ground- and air-launched cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and drones. These IAMDs have proven successful at preventing either side from achieving decisive effects even with massed strikes. The effectiveness of these IAMDs calls into question the ability of any state to rely on traditional missile systems to penetrate to their targets, a reality that should drive a reconsideration of Taiwan conflict scenarios that have assumed that high proportions of such systems would achieve their intended effects.

Both sides have responded to the development of these IAMDs by innovating strike packages and patterns to achieve temporary advantages. The Russians in particular have experimented constantly with different combinations of drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles to reconnoiter and penetrate Ukrainian air/missile defenses. Their approaches have alternated between attempting to saturate the defenses and finding weak points or vulnerabilities to exploit. Iran’s two major attacks on Israel demonstrated (unsuccessful) efforts to implement some of these Russian best practices and innovate on its own.

The cost curve of the offense-defense race in the air has become a factor in systems design. The scarcity, expense, and difficulty of mass-producing high-end interceptors has forced Ukraine (and Israel) to design IAMDs that can allocate the cheapest and most available defense systems against targets they can destroy while preserving the rarest and most expensive systems for the hardest threats—and to adjust prioritization and integration dynamically as the character of attacks changes. Sometimes important innovations come from using the most mundane technologies—Ukraine lifted the burden of shooting down many drones from expensive systems by fielding mobile fire teams equipped with shotguns and rifles, for example.

The potential combatants in a Taiwan scenario are wealthier and better able to produce large quantities of exquisite systems, but they will likely find themselves constrained by the same realities—it is simply easier to mass produce inexpensive and less complex systems with which to overwhelm exquisite defenses, and defenders must be able to defeat such systems with simple and cheap defenses of their own. The resulting IAMD must be built, therefore, to optimize algorithmically for cost and availability as well as effectiveness.

Millions of Drones

The scale of the use of unmanned systems in Ukraine is difficult to internalize. The Russians and Ukrainians will likely have deployed and used more than three million drones in 2024. These drones range from hand-held quadcopters with ranges of about 10 kilometers to longer-range quadcopters (ranges up to 40-50 kilometers in one-way attack mode) all the way to fixed-wing drones with ranges beyond 2,000 kilometers. The Russians have reportedly already used well over 6,000 Shahed-type drones with ranges up to 2,500 kilometers. These drones perform a wide array of functions but have been particularly transformative in creating a nearly-transparent battlefield. Drone operators can see nearly every individual armored vehicle and many small infantry units across the battlefield in increasingly integrated common operating pictures and can strike almost anything they can see. This phenomenon has brought the war to its current positional character in which it is almost impossible for either side to make operationally-significant advances unless they can gain a temporary set of advantages (about which more below).

Small attack drones can achieve both mission kills (disabling the target temporarily) and catastrophic kills against tanks and armored vehicles. Larger drones have been used together with missiles to achieve both mission and catastrophic kills of major and minor surface combatants and (surfaced) submarines. Drone still suffer from important limitations and can only partially replace traditional artillery, rocket, missile, and bomb systems, but they have been far more successful in destroying armored vehicles en masse than in any previous conflict.

Drones at Sea

The Ukraine war is extremely unusual in that a state with effectively no navy has inflicted major naval defeats on a great power. Ukrainian forces using different combinations of maritime and aerial drones and missiles have sunk approximately one-third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and driven it from its home base and headquarters at Sevastopol to a reserve base more than 200 miles to the east. Ukraine used a combination of drones and anti-shipping missiles to sink the Black Sea Fleet’s flagship (an air defense cruiser), as well as numerous major and minor surface combatants and submarines (dockside). Ukraine’s maritime drones have largely driven the BSF even from operating in the western Black Sea and have forced the Russians to develop and deploy extensive tactical and technical defenses. Ukrainian unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) have the range to strike Russian positions in the eastern Black Sea, but Ukrainian forces have not yet developed offsets for Russian defenses, especially the use of rotary-wing aircraft.

Electronic Warfare

Both sides have invested heavily in electronic warfare and have generated dramatic new capabilities. The Russians disrupted the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive partly by deploying jammers that disrupted GPS signals over a wide area and, in some cases, completely blocked almost all means of electronic communications. EW systems regularly disrupt drone operations at varying distances, and soldiers on both sides have personal counter-drone EW systems. Ukraine has reportedly become adept at using EW to disrupt Russian Shahed long-range fixed-wing drone operations, regularly disorienting significant percentages of the Shaheds fired.

Rapid Offense-Defense Cycling

Developments in EW have driven a very rapidly cycling race with drone developers, who constantly find ways to restore communications resilience in the face of new EW advances. The drone-EW race moves very rapidly, and significant changes can ripple across the entire thousand-kilometer front in two-three weeks. Developments take place at differential rates in three key areas: platforms (slowest, usually months); electronics (faster, often within a few weeks); and software (as fast as days in some cases). Both sides work to find and then block new frequencies, frequency-hopping, and other improved communications systems. Neither side has found a way to secure a long-term advantage in either EW or drone communications.

Neither side has developed a way to deconflict drone and EW efforts in the close fight, however, leading to extremely high rates of drone fratricide. Soldiers instinctively down any drone they see, and neither Russia nor Ukraine has fielded a trusted system to let soldiers know if a drone is friend or foe.

Implications for Taiwan

An integrated Tactical Reconnaissance-Strike Complex (TRSC) has emerged on both sides of the battleline comprised of drones and traditional fire/strike systems, and communications that has rendered successful operational-level maneuver prohibitively costly for the moment. Taiwan and the PRC could field suitably modified TRSCs for the ground forces that would face one another in the event of a successful PRC landing, but also as part of their maritime operations. The limited ranges of the most common drones can be offset by using the Taiwanese, Japanese, and possibly Philippines archipelagos to their greatest potential. Seeding those archipelagos with tens or hundreds of thousands of long-range quadcopters could provide nearly continuous coverage from Penghu to Kyushu with only one significant gap. Supplementing long-range quadcopters with smaller and much more numerous hand-held quadcopters can give individual islands, including Taiwan, an opportunity for defense-in-depth against landings or waterborne attack. Integrating the feeds of all such systems can help ensure that the maritime battlespace remains nearly transparent by supplementing radar and satellite-based surveillance with low-altitude visual observation.

The fact that quadcopters cannot sink ships does not deprive them of great potential utility in disrupting an amphibious operation. Thousands of drones circling incoming ships can confuse and disorient them, overwhelm targeting and defense systems, and attack vulnerable intelligence collection and communications components. They may be able to achieve mission kills, enough of which on the right targets could force the abandonment of an amphibious operation, or support catastrophic kills by other systems.

Taiwan and its partners must also be prepared to defend against the PRC fielding of such capabilities. Ships make excellent EW platforms, for example, and could be used to disrupt communications at long distances. PRC aerial and maritime drones can also confuse, overwhelm, and achieve mission kills against essential Taiwanese, Japanese, and US vessels and ground-based systems.

Taiwan and its partners, finally, must be prepared for the requirement of extremely rapid and continuous adaptation under fire, even in a relatively brief conflict. The systems with which both sides start the war will likely be rendered ineffective before the war is over. Success may well go to the side that can innovate at scale more rapidly and can take advantage of that innovation through dynamic planning and flexible operations. The requirement to be able to field millions of drones is a requirement to be able to produce millions of drones rapidly, not to have them warehoused in advance.

Ukraine (and Israel) are demonstrating that free societies with robust innovation centers and the ability and willingness to support decentralized innovation and creativity as well as highly flexible planning and operations can hold off much larger and, in Ukraine’s case, better resourced adversaries. Taiwan should take heart from this case study while exploring it closely for approaches that could be used, suitably modified, to defend the Republic of China.

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