Tinian Island, the last American-owned stop on the way to the South China Sea, is being restored to service. What started in the 21st century as a partial reclamation program has turned into a full-blown airbase rebuilding frenzy 80 years after the end of the war it was first built to win.
“Because the shape of the island was reminiscent of Manhattan, New York, the Seabees laid it out in a pattern, and with place names, based on the city streets there,” The War Zone explains. “By the time World War II ended, North Field was the largest airfield anywhere in the world.”
The best defense of Taiwan is deterrence. Multiple American administrations have now built up American deterrence strategy on Tinian as part of the long-desired ‘Pacific pivot’. Uncertain about the new administration’s willingness to intervene if China attacks, impressed by Ukrainian resistance, Taiwanese defense thinking has focused on ‘resilience’ and long-war planning.
Between the two policies — a Pacific defense pivot and a hardened, pricklier Taiwan — lies the formula for victory by deterrence. No nation on earth is so well-appointed to defend itself through the current military revolution, namely drones, by drawing on the lessons of Ukraine’s war in the air and in the Black Sea. The trick is to make the capabilities real and advertise them to Beijing.
“Groups of civilians transformed into territorial defense units, either as part of the formal Territorial Defense Forces or what could best be described as county militias,” reads a West Point urban warfare study of the 2022 Battle of Kyiv. “Instructors and students from the military schools, such as 169th Training Center, formed light infantry or artillery units.” It was a scratch force with scratch defenses, “a mix of National Guard, Territorial Defense Forces personnel, newly formed community defense forces, police units, and civilian volunteers.”
The army and police handed out thousands of AK-47s. In Kyiv alone, they handed out a reported twenty-five thousand rifles, ten million bullets, and rocket-propelled grenades and launchers.
The Ukrainian military established the Kyiv Defense Council the day of the attack. Its members included Colonel General Oleksandr Syrskyi (commander of Ukraine’s ground forces and the overall commander of the defense of Kyiv), Vitali Klitschko (Kyiv’s mayor), Lieutenant General Oleksandr Pavliuk (head of the Kyiv Military Administration), and many other military and civil leaders.
In summary, Taiwan would militarize the population and bring the new force under direct military command from the beginning. They would also use an app like Delta, the Ukrainian reporting system that forms the backbone of their civil-military sensor and reconnaissance networks.
Developed by the Center for Innovation and Development of Defense Technologies, an office of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, prior to the war, Delta “collected, processed, and displayed information about the enemy, giving Ukraine the capability to focus its limited resources on known Russia locations.”
This democratization of reporting, filtered through the needs of professional warrors, allowed the defense of Ukraine to succeed in its darkest hours. “The system was able to process a wide range of information from civilian closed-circuit television cameras, traffic cameras, drones, satellites, human reporting, and other sources into one common operational picture,” the West Point report explains.
Once the invasion started, civilian engineers employed dozens of volunteers to make the system fully operational. They established a main fusion center and geographic fusion centers throughout the city to collect, validate, and report vital information about the location, status, and activity of Russian forces in and around Kyiv. The geographic fusion centers also tasked groups of civilian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operators to observe the Russian advance and emplaced other sensors to observe. During the battle, the engineers emplaced high-powered cameras on some of Kyiv’s high-rise buildings.
Russians could not create a zone of safety in which to operate freely. They had no ‘rear’, only flanks. “The Ukrainians did not employ forward observers beyond the Irpin River in the west or beyond Kyiv’s city limits in the east, but they were able to maximize the power of their Delta intelligence fusion and operational picture to leverage sensors, including UAVs and civilians, to identify Russian positions.”
In one case, an elderly Ukrainian woman observed the Russians establishing a refueling and ammunition point across the street from her house in a tiny village. She telephoned someone she knew in Kyiv and when word eventually got to the right person, an artillery strike followed. The strike killed the Russian soldiers and destroyed all seven vehicles, and the fire from the ordnance continued to burn for the next twenty-four hours. Somehow, the woman’s house escaped unharmed. In the defense of Kyiv, there were many similar cases where Ukrainian citizens called others they knew in the capital or in the Army and eventually the information got to the person that could action it.
Punish the invader. Attrit the invader. Put strain on the logistics of the invasion. Make the invader pay dearly for every inch of Taiwan. Make the invader unsafe at all times, no matter where they are. Adopting this porcupine strategy out loud and proud, where Beijing can observe it, has deterrent value if China should escalate at the beginning of 2027. Call it ‘rapid readiness’ for a whole-of-society defense effort that leverages technology.
Notably, the Han Kuang exercise in July, Taiwan’s largest annual military preparedness regimen, reportedly saw an increased focus on bringing the reserves into battle. It was also the largest Han Kuang exercise ever held. As we have previously observed, China’s own capability gaps are their single biggest military deterrent, which explains the recent bursts of defense spending. Any Taiwanese show of force has the effect of discouraging Chinese adventures by making victory less certain.
As a practical matter, no actual invasion of Taiwan could ever hope to succeed without seizing the ports of Taiwan, so one very obvious, and low-cost, option to defend the island is to fill the harbors with mines. Furthermore, the naval drone revolution offers Taiwan many happy opportunities to develop low-cost ‘smart’ solutions at scale. After all, they are the island of the microchips. Why not leverage their production advantage to produce ‘smart mines’ that activate at a signal and use AI to identify and attack Chinese vessels?
Creative thinking like that will make prospects for an actual invasion seem untenable in Beijing. The trick is to put them on display before 2027, so that they have deterrence value. AI-directed, solar-powered saildrones surging in the Taiwan Strait would be a terrific way to show Xi Jinping that his forces will be seen, and targeted, before they ever reach the island shores. Of course, Taipei also needs to make sure that ammunition stockpiles are sufficient to hit anything that comes for Taiwan, and that Chinese military planners can see that.
Of course, the real question is whether the Pentagon will see it. Rather than risk American submarines in the shallow strait, why not send swarms of submersible autonomous vehicles instead? The US Air Force is already building ‘loyal wingman’ drone systems aimed at Pacific dominance. To fend off China, the United States can skip the entire problem of lost domestic shipbuilding capacity and build a force for robotic war instead. These are themes I have covered here in the past.
Another theme of this website is electronic warfare, which has deterrence value prior to a shooting conflict. Any new countermeasure that causes the enemy to develop an expensive counter-countermeasure, delaying an attack, acts as a temporary deterrent. A series of such capability-demonstrations can potentially buy years of time, and time is of the essence in defense of Taiwan. The longer China waits, the less likely a genuine invasion becomes.
Bryan Clark, senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, as well as a regular on the Association of Old Crows podcast, which covers EW news and issues, published a report in December. Titled “Winning the Fight for Sensing and Sensemaking: Fielding Cyber and Electronic Warfare Capabilities at Scale,” it calls for “distribution and non-kinetic defenses, such as electromagnetic warfare (EW) and high-power microwave systems, to increase the number of weapons PLA forces need to destroy each target, which may dissuade Chinese aggression.”
High-power microwave (HPM) weapons are relatively inexpensive and their ammunition consists of inexpensive electricity. They have range and power limitations similar to high-energy laser (HEL) weapons as well as these shared advantages, but this is less problematic defending a ship at sea, or defending Taiwan from a ship at sea against drones and missiles.
China will try to control the intensity level, and of course Beijing has the advantage that the conflict zone is close to China. “In a rapid, large-scale conflict such as an invasion, attempting to engage many US and allied targets simultaneously would dilute the PLA’s strike capacity,” Clark explains. “However, during a protracted, lower-intensity scenario like a blockade, the PLA could devote more weapons to each US or allied target,” overwhelming one such target at a time.
Wargame scenarios quickly become complicated by questions of which informal allies of Taipei Beijing chooses to strike, and how, and which potential allies to leave alone. Non-kinetic attacks on “counter-sensing and sensemaking” ability in Beijing will “remove lower rungs from China’s escalation ladder” and “restore lower-level rungs on the escalation ladder and switch this asymmetry,” Clark writes.
In order to deter PLAN aggression, “Allied forces will need a deeper magazine of non-kinetic effects than China to demonstrate to Chinese leaders that the PLA cannot sustain sensing and sensemaking superiority.” Currently, “PRC maritime militia and coast guard ships can harass and ram Philippine fishing and coast guard vessels under the protection of mainland-based ships, aircraft, air defenses, and surface-to-surface missiles.”
In a blockade scenario, Beijing would need “to understand where shipping is attempting to enter or leave the blockaded country and the position of potential escorts.” Decoys, jammers, and malicious code injections can scramble the picture of the war in Beijing, where all the important decisions will be made.
“During an invasion of Taiwan,” on the other hand, “attacking PRC forces will need an accurate target picture to avoid wasting weapons they may need later if a conflict becomes protracted, as happened in Ukraine.” Making Beijing waste lots of ammunition on ghosts and deceptions reduces the attritional advantage of their deep missile magazines in either scenario.
Clark recommends a “strategy of attacking PLA sensing and sensemaking,” known as Systems Warfare, which is essentially what China plans to attempt against the United States. Whereas the US Navy wants commanders to take initiative and act without orders, the Chinese sensor network “allows senior leaders to directly control operations and not depend on field commanders, which senior PRC officials may not trust to be effective or loyal,” Clark writes.
Between the sensor and the decider, there is someone analyzing the data, and this is the link that should be targeted, Clark suggests. “Senior PLA leaders depend on the reconnaissance-intelligence system to synthesize sensor data from widely dispersed space, land, air, and sea-based systems and provide that data to missile launchers on or near PRC territory to support long-range precision strikes.”
This sensor network is “vulnerable to jamming, deception, and communications interdiction that could confuse the PLA’s operational picture and decision-making.” In the naval context, that includes false acoustic signatures. The point is “to disrupt the communication networks that the PLA needs to simultaneously bring together the outputs of multiple sensors across domains,” Clark writes.
Jamming or interrupting these signals, such as the datalink from a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) aircraft to a ground station, would clearly degrade the reconnaissance-intelligence system’s sensor fusion capability. More subtle techniques—such as injecting code into the datalink that changes its message format—could defeat sensor fusion by slowing the integration of sensor data or by making the data appear to be associated with a different location or target.
Clark assesses that “the DoD will need a more disaggregated force with a larger number of less multifunctional — and probably uncrewed — forces to substantially degrade PLA sensemaking.” He calls for “a deep magazine of non-kinetic effects” to form “an element of dissuasion and deterrence.”
Simply making that magazine available to the alliance can alter Chinese objectives, for “the higher dependence of an invasion on the reconnaissance-intelligence system suggests counter-sensing and sensemaking operations could drive down PRC leaders’ preference for that scenario and make other scenarios more attractive.” We might still get a conflict, but it could be a much less intense or bloody one, perhaps even entirely non-kinetic.
Mirroring the PLA’s own Systems Warfare approach also means taking advantage of the electromagnetic spectrum, including space, as a kind of ‘gray zone’ for ‘hybrid war’, the fashionable phrase for hostilities short of kinetic conflict. In other words, an American or Taiwanese or Japanese president can push back without blowing anything up, in ways that Beijing will notice, but will not want to admit have worked.
Although the US already has a ‘deep magazine’ of EW capabilities, Clark calls attention to the limited range of platforms. “The DoD’s supply chain for cyber tools and EW techniques and systems lacks the diversity and capacity it needs to engage in a protracted sensing and sensemaking competition,” he writes. That could prove a problem in the event of a protracted conflict, especially a low-intensity one.
“US forces will need a wide variety of effects to conduct a peacetime dissuasion campaign, ranging from the most capable ‘silver bullets’ it will require to gain the upper hand in a war to the ‘lead’ or ‘brass’ bullets necessary to undermine adversary sensing and sensemaking over a sustained, multi-year peacetime competition,” Clark advises.
Two EW systems followed here at Polemology.net epitomize this issue. The US Army’s new Terrestrial Layer System started out as an expensive vehicle-borne concept with a man-packable variant for dismounted infantry. Observing the war in Ukraine, the Pentagon ditched the Stryker vehicles and also the Top Secret SIGINT component of the Manpack system, which had restricted the number of soldiers who could operate it.
Now the Army at last has a standardized dismounted backpack EW system to protect soldiers against radio-controlled drones and other threats. As I noted a year ago, however, the Army has ordered just 52 of these systems for the entire force. The numbers of TLS BCT systems being produced now are supposed to be enough for the Army’s requirements in the Pacific, but historical experience suggests that, without exaggeration, in the event of a shooting conflict the US Army would want 52 of these systems on Tinian island alone.
Then there is the EA-37B Compass Call, a dead-sexy Gulfstream G550 jet with fat cheeks full of venom that can fly high and fast, disrupting those sensor-fusion and control networks like a champ. “The Air Force has said that it expects to receive five aircraft this year and plans to operate a fleet of 10 EA-37Bs by 2029,” however, so will there even be enough of them in the event of war? After all, each of them is taking actual years for BAE Systems and L3Harris to finish.
Whereas the US electronic engineering industry is capable of inventing something like the Terrestrial Layer System, then downsizing it from a truck or armored vehicle mount to a soldier’s backpack, in the space of only two years, American manufacturing is not as capable of rapid increases of production scale. Americans will at some point need to have a national conversation about their defense industrial base and EW must be part of that conversation. Not because we want to monger war with China, but because deterrent strength keeps the peace with communists in crisis.
A Bullet With Butterfly Wings
Although I was never aboard an EC-130H Compass Call, I had the utmost respect for it. During a memorable rotation at the National Training Center (NTC), located on Fort Irwin, I got to help make calls for fire from one of these planes flying out from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizon…