In rhythm In just a few years, the drone has become a tool in the war. Conflicts in Ukraine, Iran, Nagorno-Karabakh, Sudan and other places have shown that autonomous vehicles have become a part of the quintessence of modern battle.
It is a fact Taiwan knows too clearly. Island nation, fear The upcoming invasion from ChinaThere are both necessary needs, secrets and industry to build a strong and advanced drone program.
However, Taiwan, which has set an ambitious goal of producing 180,000 unmanned aircraft each year in 2028, struggling to create this industry from the beginning. Last year, it produced less than 10,000.
Cathy Fang, a policy analyst at the Institute of Democratic, Social and Emerging Technology Research (DSET), said that Taiwan is definitely capable of creating the best drones in the world.
So why not?
Design a hell
Fang and her colleagues published a long report on June 16, showing how slow the drone industry of Taiwan was. According to their research, the country has produced 8,000 to 10,000 air vehicles (UAV) in the past year, with the structural challenges of Islam, in the way of the current speed and ambitious goals. Their research shows that Taiwanese drones are hindered by high production costs, low domestic shopping and minimum foreign government orders.
Fang and other DSET researchers announced the connection of their reports in their Taipei office in May.
Taiwan has lived under China's threat of aggression for decades, but in recent years has turned it into a more immediate possibility. Beijing made it clear that they intended to complete the strong modernization of the People's Liberation Army in 2027; Taiwanese officials said the invasion could arrive early but almost certainly before the current term of Premier Xi Jinping ended in 2029.
Although there are competitive views on what form, accuracy, the invasion of the Chinese military may occur, military analysts in Taiwan are afraid it can be a full combination of weapons: from the air and the sea at first, then a full invasion of land.
That means Taiwan is required to offer creative solutions to defend and quickly. As an American commander commented in 2023, Taiwan's self -defense would mean turning the Taiwan Strait into a Chinese Chinese and Chinese aircraft with a series of air and naval vehicles. This strategy does not need to completely destroy the Chinese Navy and the Air Force, but it needs to discourage Beijing's advances long enough for Taiwan's allies to gather to protect it.
Taipei has done some of these rights. In 2022, the Government launched the national team, a program suitable for the Government and the industry to expand the fledgling field. Specifically, the group has been sent to study from Ukraine, who has a defensive strategy that has been greatly dependent on small, tactical and cheap UAVs capable of performing many tasks and closely integrated with ground units. Today, the country is proud to have a huge domestic unmanned aircraft industry, with Kyiv planning to buy 4.5 million small unmanned aircraft this year, on the top of the long -range missile program, autonomous land and unmanned navy aircraft have not been recorded.