Ukraine Today, Taiwan Tomorrow
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This is CNA Talks, the flagship podcast of CNA, a Washington, D.C.-based research and analysis organization. "Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow" is now a commonly used phrase in Taiwan. For decades, Taipei treated an invasion by mainland China as a remote possibility.

However, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has made this invasion appear more credible and generated a sense of urgency among Taiwan's leaders. In this episode, we discuss the Taiwanese government's reforms to turn their military into a credible deterrent and warfighting force.

Today we're going to be talking about a new report from CNA, "Taiwan Lessons Learned from the Russia-Ukraine War." And I'm excited to welcome two of the report's authors to join me today for this discussion. April Herlevy is a senior research scientist in CNA's China Studies program. She is an expert on the People's Republic of China, foreign security policy, economic statecraft for technology acquisition, and the increasing role of PRC commercial, economic, and military actors globally.

April, thanks for coming on the show. Great to be here. I'm also pleased to welcome back Dr. Kevin Polpeter, who's Director of Research at Air University's China Aerospace Studies Institute. Kevin is an internationally recognized expert on China's space program and has been widely published on national security issues related to China. Before joining Cassie, he was the Senior Research Scientist at CNA. Kevin, thanks for joining the show and welcome back to CNA Talks. Happy to be here.

You know, what was the impotence for this report and how did you why did you choose to study this? Well, obviously, in the China Studies Division at CNA, we do a lot of work on cross-strait relations in general and looking at the PLA. But what we discovered was there's been a lot of discussions in the last several years about Taiwan. But what there hasn't been a sufficient number of is studies that actually use Taiwan primary source materials.

to look at this topic. So we really thought it was important to actually look at how they are describing their defense changes and their reactions to the Russia-Ukraine war. So this was funded with internal CNA funding to look at that very issue. It's honestly a little surprising to hear that there was such a big gap, you know, that like people are looking at Taiwan without looking at Taiwanese sources. That seems like that would have been one of the first places you look.

Shockingly, over the last few decades, we've seen this in other instances as well, where maybe it's just the lack of language skills or the capacity to do that kind of research. But unfortunately, that has been the case in other areas as well. But it is really important, I think, to look at primary source materials to understand the domestic context and how they're interpreting international events.

I think one of the important additions of this study to the study of both Taiwan and even the Chinese military is that we take a good look using Taiwan military journals and sources for this, not just looking at the English language news. I think one of the reasons why the study is unique is that we're actually looking at what the Taiwan military is saying about the lessons learned from Ukraine and not just drawing upon sort of our own thoughts.

Because there is a difference between what is published in English and what is published in a nation's native language a lot of the time. There's often a more global perspective in the English publications than there is in the native language publications. So I think not being intimidated by that language barrier and still going for that is very important. And so I just do want to give you all kudos for doing that. I know that the language capability in our China Studies program here is really great. That's a really...

good thing that we can bring to the table on this. And can you maybe talk a little bit about how CNA funding made this possible? You mentioned that in your answer, April. Yeah, we have an internal process each year that basically you can put together proposals with ideas like this, and then it goes to a committee to review. And in this case, you know, we made the case that there was not a sufficient number of studies, as we said. The other thing that's interesting is there's been a lot of

war games and other efforts to look at Taiwan. And again, those studies, because they didn't look at the primary source materials that we used in this study, like military journals, the internal CNA funding committee decided that this was worth doing. So that's exactly what we did. Getting into the substance of your report, you know, how has the view of the possibility of a PRC invasion of Taiwan changed since the invasion of Ukraine? And Kevin, you can start us off on this one.

Sure. I think a lot has been made about this 2027 deadline where Xi Jinping has ordered the PLA to be able to take Taiwan by 2027. It's important to note that while that order may be real, it doesn't necessarily mean that China is going to attack in 2027.

However, one would hope that one of the takeaways that the PLA is taking from the Russian invasion of Ukraine is that sometimes military operations don't go exactly as intended and that they can become a lot more complicated. And so they're studying the lessons of the

war in Ukraine, just as we are and just as Taiwan is. But I also think that, you know, as all three sides sort of study the issue, I think it's important for us, you know, to remember that over the past few years, you know, what we've seen is that the measures that a country takes to defend itself is as important or maybe even more important than the support given by the U.S.,

If there is a recognition on the part of a country that a threat exists and there is a correct recognition of that threat, then that can lead to proper means of defense. And while the PLA has been focused on Taiwan for decades now, I think we are beginning to see now a recognition of the threat in Taiwan itself and that they're beginning to prepare better for a potential China attack.

And this is probably especially important, given that there are similarities and differences between Ukraine and Taiwan. Both, of course, are democracies threatened by territorial ambitions of a larger, more powerful neighbor. Both have strong linguistic, cultural, and economic ties with

their larger neighbor. But as we look at that dynamic, there are also some important differences that exist between the two nations. Most notably, Ukraine has land borders and Taiwan is an island. So this both benefits and disadvantages Taiwan. PRC efforts to invade Taiwan would be greatly complicated by the necessity to conduct an amphibious landing on Taiwan's shore. So think of the Ukraine invasion and how that

how complicated that would be, then put in, you know, doing a crossing against over 90 miles of ocean becomes exponentially more difficult. On the other hand, Ukraine's land borders facilitate international support, the flow of people and supplies, whereas a blockade of Taiwan could cut off the island from material support. So we're looking at potentially a more difficult situation in supporting Taiwan if hostilities broke out.

And then finally, whereas Ukraine's sovereignty is supported by many countries, Taiwan's unique status could limit its ability to garner international support.

Yeah, the only other things I would add to that really great introduction is the idea that I think there were some segments in Taiwan that really thought in the modern world in which we live, it wouldn't be the norm to invade another country. And so I think some people downplayed the threat from China. And then seeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the way it took place, even though it was, you know, people talked about it, the Russian troops amassing on the border and things like that.

that, they thought it was unlikely. And then to see it happen, I think it created a sense of urgency in Taiwan that may not have been there previously. And following up to that, the other thing that is unrelated to our specific report, but after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited in Taiwan, we've seen great increases in the incursions of PLA vessels, planes, and other things into Taiwan airspace. And so

the combination of those two has really made it clear to Taiwan that they do need to worry about their own defense and that this is a legitimate concern for their own security.

It's interesting that you mentioned that Speaker Pelosi's visit. I actually have a personal friend who lives in Taiwan, is an English teacher there. And at the time when Pelosi when visited, I reached out to them just to like see what they were seeing on the ground there. And at that point, the general attitude in Taiwan was like, oh, there'll be a lot of bluster around this, but ultimately it'll all kind of, you know, calm down. And

based on this conversation, it seems like both the, you know, the tangible actions of the PRC since then, and also the Russian invasion of Ukraine has shifted that attitude within Taiwan. Absolutely. Just as a follow-on anecdote to your friend, I was actually on a flight to Taiwan in 2023, and I was sitting next to a woman that she said basically,

that she never thought the threat from China was real until after the Pelosi visit. And she was on a plane where they were like, they were doing some of the missile tests and they announced it on the flight that she was returning from. And none of this was prompted. I just, I didn't even talk about what I did for a living. And she was just sort of sharing this. She's like, I never thought it was real until I was on that plane. And I felt like maybe what if I got shot down

And it was so it was so palpably different just hearing those kind of antidotes. It is interesting that something has shifted, at least among some segments of the population. So let's get into this, what Taiwan's doing to prepare for this possibility. April, can you give us a big picture idea of what Taiwan is working on to prepare for this potential invasion?

In terms of the big picture of the report itself, what we did to make it sort of more digestible is really organize it in terms of five main lessons learned. To be clear, there's more than that. I still think this is a really rich area of research to do more work on. But we talked mainly about four structure changes. That's lesson learned one. Lesson learned two is personnel changes. So training, equipping your force, training.

Lesson three is autonomous systems and the importance of that. Lesson four is the importance of satellite communications and communications network redundancy. And then lesson five is thinking about cognitive warfare. So if you look into the report, we talk in additional detail on all five of those topics.

And I'll just kind of start with some of the more force structure and personnel changes. The Taiwan government has enacted a multifaceted reform, what they're calling all out defense. And this includes a lot of different aspects to it. Some of the big ones are changing from the force structure from just regular and reserve forces to four different types of forces. Now, main garrison, reserve and civil defense forces are,

The other big changes is in terms of training. They have changed basically aspects of the training cycle itself. And potentially the most controversial form in 2022, Taiwan's legislative yuan, basically the equivalent of its parliament or Congress, extended the military conscription service period from four months

to one year. Those changes just took effect in 2024. So we're seeing a lot of these changes go into place right now. As I said, in the report itself, we go into a lot more detail specifically on the types of personnel training

That has been extended basically from five weeks to eight weeks, but there's a lot more impetus on doing modern combat training, field first aid, and live fire training, things that really didn't happen for their conscript forces prior to this time. I will say this is all just in the midst of being implemented now, so it's, in our opinion, a bit too soon to tell if this is going to be sufficient, but a lot of these changes happen.

are pretty major and underway right now. With that, though, I will turn it over to Kevin to talk a little bit more about lessons three and four, basically uncrewed systems and satellite communications. Just quickly, before we move to those next points, I did have one follow on. Can you just, you know, how does that connect to the Ukraine war? What examples have they looked at within the Ukrainian forces to make these changes?

Sure. So basically, Ukraine's Territorial Defense Force served as a model for the changes the Taiwan military is making in terms of its restructuring. They recognize that they need a better defense in depth, and basically they need a more clear system for improving deterrence. So a lot of this in terms of the broader force structure changes, we're basically looking at what had to happen in Ukraine and the type of things that

the Ukrainian military had done. I will note, though, what Taiwan has not done is adopted Ukraine's popular resistance model. So this idea that you would have sort of the whole of society taking up arms, that is something that we haven't seen much interest in terms of

the broader Taiwan defense changes. So they're really doing this within their military and in their conscription forces. Now, they have recognized that there needs to be some broader civil defense component, and those changes are being made. They've taken some models from the Ukraine to implement domestically. But in other instances, they've recognized that what's going on in Ukraine doesn't necessarily work for what they're trying to do domestically.

I think what April has pointed out here is really important about modeling the structure of Taiwan's military after the Ukraine military. And what she said exactly right, the modeling after the Ukrainian territorial defense forces. And what we see in the old system, what is that? It was really just a

active duty reserve system, but that reserve system was antiquated, people were ill trained, and the ability to mobilize them quickly was going to be really, really difficult. And so what we see with these reforms, especially increasing the conscription terms of service from four months to a year, is an effort to increase the readiness of Taiwan's military. And what they hope then is that

that the volunteers, the people who are serving for four years, sometimes six years, what have you, they're gonna be the vanguard force. They're gonna be the people that are on the beaches fighting the PLA. But then the conscripts, the garrison forces taking a cue from the Ukrainian territorial forces, these are the people that are gonna be holed up in the cities, barricading important choke points.

and defeating or countering a PLA invasion if the PLA were to break out of their bridgehead. So there's some important areas here, especially in training, new equipment like javelins and stingers. So they're trying to bring some of those lessons learned about how the Ukraine military sort of as a national army set out to defeat Russia during its initial invasion.

Got it. Thank you both for that. Kevin, can you tell us a bit more about some other areas of reform that Taiwan's been exploring? Yeah. So I think when we finished up with this paper, we would, I think one of our conclusions was that Taiwan is drawing many of the same lessons that we are from the Ukraine war. And one of those was the use of uncrewed systems, right? We're

We look on YouTube, see all sorts of quadcopters dropping small bombs down the hatches of Russian tanks, that sort of thing. It's really been one of the prominent features of the coverage of the war and sort of a hallmark of how this war differs from previous wars.

What we did find in researching this report is that just a few months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, then Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen ordered the Taiwan military to do a study of the lessons for Taiwan. And we don't know its exact contents, but we know that President Tsai, coming out of that meeting, prioritized the development of uncrewed systems.

And we also know that that report said that the PRC is in both numbers and quality of uncrewed systems ahead of Taiwan. And so Taiwan, in response, has established a national effort of what it calls a national drone team that is made up of industry, government, academic and research entities. And this is intended to build up a drone industry network.

in Taiwan. Now, that's going to be easier said than done because what Taiwan is finding out is that they have the manufacturing capability to build drones, but a lot of the components come from the PRC. Having said that, they have

The goal to build thousands of drones by 2028, both manufacturing them domestically as well as acquiring them from the U.S. So, for example, this past August, they purchased a thousand drones from the U.S. So this is an area where Taiwan is moving out quite substantially.

It's not surprising that China has more of these systems than Taiwan does. I mean, especially when you take into account that like a lot of in the Ukraine war, a lot of these are commercially made drones that are very cheap to produce in comparison to like the high end military drones that the United States has been using for decades.

And the a lot in the Ukraine war, a lot of the a lot of the systems that both sides are using are made in China. So just naturally, like, of course, the domestic manufacturing in China for those kind of systems is very developed.

Yeah, that's exactly right. And so the commercial industry there for drone production in China is just enormous. The Chinese company DJI has something like 70% of the international market. They're the manufacturer of the small quadcopters that we see in Ukraine. And actually, they're widely used around the world, including here in the US. I think what's important is that in a Taiwan scenario, however, those small quadcopters would

may play less of a role simply because they don't have the range to get over the Taiwan Strait. So if you're looking at either China sending drones over to Taiwan or Taiwan trying to send drones over to China, you're going to need larger systems that have the range and the payload to actually be able to get over there and still conduct on the mission and maybe even get back.

So it's going to be a little bit of a different type of setup than what we've seen in the Ukraine war. Another really interesting difference between the two conflicts. Another piece of technological reform that we maybe want to get into is satellite communications. Can you guys get into that a little bit?

I think what, you know, the use of Starlink by both Ukraine nationally and the Ukraine military has been also one of the prominent features of the war in Ukraine. And as we've seen recently, you know, Taiwan cannot rely simply on submarine cables to maintain connectivity. We saw that with the

the cutting of the submarine cable in the Baltic Sea. Submarine cables to Taiwan have been cut over 30 times in the past few years. So it's an easy way for China to try and cut off Taiwan from the rest of the world. But the problem with Starlink is that it does not cover Taiwan. And Taiwan has been reluctant to contract with Starlink simply because China

Taiwan laws mandate that there must be Taiwan majority ownership of telecommunications companies. So what we see is that in 2023, Taiwan signed a contract with OneWeb, and that coverage began in October of this year. Taiwan also plans to launch its own satellite communication system made up to 120 to 150 satellites.

So let's get into the information warfare, which of course is something we hear a lot about in Ukraine, but also just like globally now, like the propaganda war in the modern information environment is a big part of any conflict. Absolutely, John. There's a huge challenge from PRC cognitive warfare. But it's interesting because Taiwan's been well aware of this for, quite frankly, decades.

Tsai Ing-wen, the former president, has mentioned that this could potentially be Taiwan's biggest challenge. But what's interesting is as we looked into the materials about lessons learned from Ukraine, this was one where a lot of Taiwan officials or defense analysts really felt that the Taiwan experience in dealing with Chinese disinformation is fundamentally different. Russia and China do operate somewhat differently internationally.

in that realm. So there was sort of a sense that the lessons learned may not be as applicable to Taiwan. So there's a lot of resources already within the Ministry of Digital Affairs and others within Taiwan to deal with it, a lot of it through fact-checking organizations. But I do think it's

important to note that the PRC campaign in Taiwan is pretty active. They have a lot of disinformation that's about basically defaming the Taiwan military. There's a lot of work that's basically about trying to generate skepticism about whether or not the United States would defend Taiwan in the

instance of an invasion and also instigate fear in the population. So these cognitive warfare campaigns that China is pursuing are quite active, but Taiwan's well aware of them and doing a lot of things to try to counter them. And at that point, I'd see if Kevin had anything else to add there.

Yeah, I would just say Tsai Ing-wen said that when she was president that she called PRC cognitive warfare efforts the greatest threat to Taiwan democracy. So it's definitely on Taiwan's radar screen. There's no easy fix to it. Fact checking and telling the truth can only go so far. So it's a constant battle that Taiwan is fighting with the PRC.

Well, we've seen that in our own country where, you know, you can debunk false narratives all day. But if there if these false narratives emotionally resonate with people, they're often inclined to continue to hold those beliefs, even when presented with alternative information.

So it's something that I think the whole world is struggling with. How do you counter misinformation effectively? So just to wrap things up, though, what would you say is the number one thing you'd like our listeners to take away from our discussion?

Sure. I think one of the main takeaways is that a lot of the focus here in the U.S. is on what types of weapons and equipment we should be providing to Taiwan. I think our recent history and our study here highlights the importance of the internal efforts that countries take on to improve their own defenses, and that they have to have a proper recognition of the threat and then move out to actually deal with those threats.

So I think that one of the main takeaways is we need to be as cognizant or more cognizant of what Taiwan is doing internally to defend itself and then take steps to assist them, help them in preparing those defenses. Yeah, I think that's great what Kevin said. I think that's so important to understand what they're doing. The only thing I would add is I do think there is a sense of urgency since 2022 that has palpably changed in Taiwan. And I think it's really important to note that

But whether or not all the reforms that Taiwan is making are going to be sufficient, I think that remains to be seen. And that's why it's so important to do just what Kevin said, is to pay attention to how these debates are being framed, what indicators we can watch. As we point out in the report, we have a whole range of indicators we think are going to be sufficient.

that are important to watch to see how Taiwan is making progress on all of these changes. So keeping an eye on that will help us assess whether or not what they're doing is going to be sufficient in the long term. Great. Well, absolutely. This has been a really insightful conversation, and I've learned a lot from talking to both of you. But we are just about out of time. I want to thank you both so much for coming on today. Thank you for having us. Glad to be here. Thanks.

For our listeners, the report is Taiwan Lessons Learned from the Russia-Ukraine War. You can find a link to that in the show notes, along with a link to CNA's Innovation Incubator, where you can explore more of our self-funded research. But I want to thank you all so much for listening, and we'll see you next time on CNA Talks.

The views expressed are those of the commentators and do not necessarily reflect those of CNA or any of its sponsors. CNA Talks is produced, edited, and mixed by John Stimson. Our theme music is by Edward Granga. If you enjoy our show, we'd love it if you could give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and tell your friends about us. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you in two weeks.