Taiwan wants US-made loitering munitions to deter Chinese invasion

Taiwan wants to buy American-made loitering munitions – also known as suicide drones – that have become one of the signature weapons on the modern battlefield from Nagorno-Karabakh to Ukraine, hovering above the battle for hours before swooping in. kill.

Taiwan wants to buy American-made loitering munitions – also known as suicide drones – that have become one of the signature weapons on the modern battlefield from Nagorno-Karabakh to Ukraine, hovering above the battle for hours before swooping in. kill.

Taiwan — which has faced almost daily Chinese military exercises for the past three years, including People’s Liberation Army warplanes that have flooded the island’s air defense identification zone and virtually obliterated the median line running across the Taiwan Strait — could move to both require variants. the AeroVironment Switchblade drone, according to four people familiar with the situation.

The Switchblade, which in its smallest form fits in a backpack and also has a much larger variant that can take out tanks and armored vehicles, costs about 50,000 dollars per drone, according to the manufacturer. The US military has stopped buying the smaller variant known as the Switchblade 300, but the new supplemental budget passed by Congress gives the Department of Defense about $72 million to buy hundreds more of the larger variant, the Switchblade 600, and service is expected to begin fieldwork the drones next year.

Taiwan’s interest in American-made drones is a growing sign that Taipei is bowing to American pressure — dating back to the Trump administration — to focus on buying munitions that would help deter or deter a Chinese invasion of the island ward off.

“This is all part of the American push for asymmetry,” said Ivan Kanapathy, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former National Security Council official during the Trump administration. “We told them, ‘You need to buy a lot more ammunition.’”

The first loitering munitions date back to the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, but only really came into fashion during the Iran-Iraq War. Second war in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020, when Israeli-made loitering munitions supported a lightning Azerbaijani ground offensive that overwhelmed a less tech-savvy Armenian army fighting in the open.

The AeroVironment Switchblade is the American version. Manufactured in California and Utah, the Switchblade is fired from a tube and has been widely used by the Ukrainian military. About 1,100 US-made Switchblades have been sent to Ukraine since the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The Kremlin has countered this with the production of the Lancet drone and supplemented it with Shahed drones from Iran that usage satellite navigation instead of a radiation finder.

All these variants have been effective on the battlefield and are now almost ubiquitous, although pocket-sized jammers used to disable them have become almost as ubiquitous. Their applications have also evolved. For years, China has deployed the so-called “Harpy,” an Israeli-made loitering munition designed to disable enemy radars. (The second generation of that weapon, known as the ‘Harop’, was Azerbaijan’s weapon of choice in the 2020 war.)

And over time, China’s advantage in the air has only grown, and so have Chinese strategists come to faith that the weapon could be effective in modern attrition warfare. Sky News recently reported that China now has tens of thousands of drone variants. The Taiwanese themselves have about four types of drones.

But Taiwanese officials increasingly believe the U.S. is made Suicide drones – which are only good for one shot – would be effective at causing Chinese ships to plunder if they encounter the Taiwan Strait or hit Chinese tanks and vehicles as they come ashore, the people familiar with Taiwan’s interest said in the drones, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing military sale.

Taiwan has submitted a request letter to the Defense Ministry for a drone that would fit the Switchblade 300, although the people familiar with the request said AeroVironment was not specifically mentioned. Taiwan has sent a second request letter to the Pentagon for a larger drone variant, with competition between the Switchblade 600 and Andurils Altius-600, which can hang out over a target for four hours, longer than AeroVironment’s model.

A spokesperson for the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States, Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington, declined to comment, citing the practice of not discussing details of U.S. defense cooperation.

In an email, Lisa Lawrence, a spokesperson for the Defense Department, said the agency would not comment on proposed defense sales before communicating them to Congress. Anduril declined to comment and AeroVironment did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

The Biden administration has begun to make a dent in the $19 billion in backlog of military sales to Taiwan in recent years, approving 13 congressional announcements for arms sales since 2021. But the deals focused almost exclusively on matters related to the Pentagon’s integrated capabilities. list, a register of cost-effective weapons that mainly includes ammunition, and maintaining the weapons they already have.

Taiwan’s outgoing president, Tsai Ing-wen, has also done so made it a requirement for the island to deploy more than 3,000 military drones, and about 50 Taiwanese research teams compete for more than $300 million in government contracts. Much of that money is directed domestically.

That investment has already had an impact. Taiwanese companies have unveiled their own self made loitering munitions, which can hit targets up to 150 kilometers away. Taiwan has also started a quasi-government agency to function like the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a defense technology incubator that claims at least partial credit for modern inventions such as GPS and the Internet.

Heino Klinck, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defense, said Taiwan’s long-term goal is to build weapons that are easily replaceable and can be produced on the island, not just expensive US-made weapons to buy. “The Taiwanese must be selective in the way they invest,” Klinck said. “You have to be able to deal with the new normal that the Chinese have established and continue to establish on an almost daily basis.”