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Outsized and outgunned, Taiwan must turn to asymmetric warfare to maintain independence and raise the human cost of any invasion on the island.
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Indeed, within the Taiwan Strait alone, the US Congress has estimated that China has fielded more than four times the number of military individuals: fielding 416,000 personnel compared to Taiwan’s 88,000.
As such, Taiwan’s Quadrennial Defense Review affirmed that the nation’s strategic objective was to “raise the cost and risk of PRC invasion” as a primary deterrence mechanism against invasion — a nuanced nod to China’s overwhelming conventional superiority.
Alongside the acquisition of conventional weapons, interestingly, the Quadrennial Defense Review doubled-down the government’s commitment to all-out defence — a concept by which the Taiwanese government can rapidly mobilise the nation’s available manpower to repel invading forces.
Writing for the Modern War Institute, Dr Chris Bassler and Aidan Greer encouraged the Taiwanese government to embrace the equalising effects of irregular warfare to raise the cost of a Chinese invasion.
While the pair recognise the importance of Taiwan moving toward a Porcupine Strategy — defined broadly as a large number of small but impactful weapons systems including sea mines, artillery, anti-ship missiles and drones to defensively wear down an invading force — the pair contend that uptake is sluggish.
Indeed, the Porcupine Strategy has all the hallmarks of an effective defence policy.
First, relying on offence-defence theory, island states have an inherent “build-up advantage at point of attack”. According to Professor Adam Lockyer in Australia’s Defence Strategy, this is because the military capabilities of offensive states are funnelled by water — constrained by the number of air or water craft that can transport assets and fighters — and thus are unable to completely exert their power. At the time of writing his textbook, Professor Lockyer estimated that despite the millions of soldiers in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), that China could only transport 10,000–15,000 at any one point in time.
Second, the assets used within the Porcupine Strategy such as mobile artillery, mines, and coastal cruise missiles are affordable relative to large-scale conventional weaponry, meaning that Taiwan can buy the capabilities at scale. According to James Timbie and Admiral James Ellis Jr in the Military Strategy journal, the vast scale at which these capabilities can be purchased would indicate that many of the assets could survive China’s initial shock and awe missile strikes, and still “engage Chinese forces crossing the strait”.
While this indicates an improvement on Taiwan’s prior focus on conventional weaponry, Bassler and Greer nevertheless urge Taiwan to integrate guerrilla warfare into their deterrent model. To the pair, guerrilla warfare will add additional redundancies in the event of PLA victories in major population centres.
This has, however, been overlooked.
Current demographic trends indicate that there would be willingness from the nation’s population to undertake guerrilla-style irregular warfare following a Chinese invasion from both the nation’s voter base and elites.
Citing research from the Taipei Times, the pair contend that 72.5 per cent of Taiwan’s population have indicated willingness to fight against Chinese occupation, with local elites funding partisan training movements.
“There is newfound private sector support for a civilian defence force in Taiwan. Robert Tsao, founder of one of Taiwan’s leading semiconductor manufacturers, recently announced his plans to spend more than $30 million of his own money to fund the training of three million “civilian warriors” over the next three years with Kuma Academy, a civilian defense organisation,” Bassler and Greer penned.
Though it has yet to fully integrate irregular guerrilla forces into the nation’s order of battle, Taiwan’s government has steadily begun the nation’s infrastructure for occupation.
“And it has created a system of underground bases and tunnels, safe houses, hide sites, shelter areas, and mountain refuges, not to mention bunkers along the coastlines,” they observe.
“Taiwan could again look to the Swiss for a model of how to destroy infrastructure to make it useless to occupiers, especially when considering the value of semiconductor foundries.
“Paired with an Operation Paperclip-style effort that would temporarily relocate key swaths of the Taiwanese workforce to places such as Japan, the United States, South Korea, and Australia, this could keep vital technology and knowledge out of the hands of the CCP.”
The pair also suggest making irregular warfare material widely available for the population to disrupt enemy forces following an invasion. Indeed, this has been done to great success in Ukraine.
In June, Defence Connect published an article examining Ukraine’s “National Resistance Center”.
Emblazoned with the tagline “Together we turn our enemies’ lives into hell!”, the educational website run by Ukraine’s special operations forces offers must-know tips and tricks to train Ukraine’s behind enemy lines guerilla forces.
Ukrainian special operations forces have created this website to train the country’s guerrilla and partisan fighters, publishing an educational course on how to conduct insurgency operations behind enemy lines.
Titled Citizen resistance on occupied territories!, the 19-page Ukrainian language handbook details how everyone can conduct sabotage and civil resistance operations from pencil-pushing bureaucrats to priests.
Indeed, the document provides a roadmap into how Ukraine has structured their guerrilla warfare strategy, with the country’s insurgency operations conducted via three concentric nodes:
- The underground: the organisational structure that oversees the conduct of operations within occupied territories.
- The guerrilla forces: now civilians with military experience who engage Russian soldiers and conduct armed operations.
- Civilian resistance: those civilians who can enable the underground and guerrillas to successfully conduct their operations through simple acts of resistance and sabotage.
Among those professions given advice as part of the SOF handbook include:
- Government managers
- Government office workers
- Pharmacists, doctors or nurses
- Warehouse managers
- Police officers
- Priests
- Teachers
- Mine workers, and
- Agricultural workers.
In the document, advice given to government workers includes suggestions to “misunderstand” orders and “ask endless questions”, while priests have been encouraged to take up employment as postal workers to administer to parishioners.
Meanwhile doctors have been encouraged to over-prescribe medications to their patients in order to facilitate the transfer of medical supplies to the underground.
The educational document also contains a series of recommendations for civil disobedience.
Recommendations range from the mundane, including setting off fire alarms in everyday locations such as shopping malls to distract Russian forces, clogging toilets, unscrewing lightbulbs.
Through to more destructive suggestions, including the sabotage of electrical systems, engines, and impairment of conveyor belts in mining operations.
In addition to the sabotage manual which can be found here, the centre also provides regular news updates of how civilian actors have undertaken bouts of civil disobedience to disrupt Russian occupiers, as well as analyses of how to protect yourself throughout the unrest and latest updates detailing trending guerrilla methods.
One article teaches Ukrainians to use VPNs to bypass Russian-blocked websites, while others illustrate how to avoid being misrepresented by Russian media outlets as supportive of the invasion, or even what to do if you see a Russian drone.
One of the news items even seems to discuss acts of violence undertaken against collaborators, detailing how partisans blew up the car of Russian collaborators in Kherson — though the targets survived.
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