Taiepi, Taiwan – On a bright morning last month, three sea drones skimmed across Su’ao Bay, off of Taiwan’s rugged northeast coast.

The tiny “stealth” Carbon Voyager 1, fast-moving Black Tide I, and explosives-carrying Sea Shark 800 were the highlight of an expo for companies vying to help Taiwan build up a maritime drone force.

Recommended Stories

Taipei believes drones could be pivotal in repelling China in the event its forces attempt to invade the self-ruled island, which Beijing has threatened to annex by force if necessary.

Su’ao is just 60km (37 miles) from Fulong, one of the so-called “red beaches” identified by defence experts as potential landing sites for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) due to their unique topography.

Whereas Russia sent tanks across land borders to launch its war on Ukraine in 2022, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would involve Beijing sending vessels across the 180-km- (112-mile-)wide Taiwan Strait.

While the Taiwan Strait’s choppy waters and Taiwan’s mountainous geography and shallow beaches pose formidable challenges to an amphibious invasion, technological advances and a decades-long modernisation campaign by the PLA have steadily chipped away at the island’s natural defences.

Faced with a drastically larger and more powerful opponent, Taiwan’s defence strategy has steadily shifted towards honing the ability to wage asymmetric warfare so that an invasion is too costly for Beijing to consider.

Drones, from sea craft to single-use suicide weapons and high-altitude intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) vehicles, are a key element of Taipei’s so-called “porcupine strategy”.

“It doesn’t mean that we need to build one drone for their one drone,” Chen Kuan-ting, a lawmaker from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party who sits on the legislature’s foreign affairs and defence committee, told Al Jazeera.

Instead, Chen said, Taiwan can maintain its edge through “disruptive innovations”.

“We have to encourage startups to find something cheaper and something that would fit the terrain of Taiwan. This is our advantage,” he said.

Taiwan is no stranger to high-tech manufacturing.

The East Asian democracy is the world’s top chipmaker, thanks to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which produces about 90 percent of the most advanced semiconductors, but it also excels at making everything from wind turbines to screws and fasteners for the aerospace industry.

In 2022, Taiwan’s government launched the “Drone National Team” initiative in a bid to develop a homegrown drone industry capable of repelling a Chinese invasion and keeping up production under wartime conditions.

While Taiwan’s defence sector has been developing drones since the 1990s, Taiwanese manufacturers have long struggled to compete with the low prices offered by Chinese manufacturers, particularly Shenzhen-based DJI, which holds a more than 70 percent share of the global market.

The war in Ukraine, which has seen Kyiv make extensive use of drone warfare to hold its own against Moscow, has only reinforced the belief in Taipei that unmanned vehicles could be decisive in fending off its much bigger military foe.

Under Taipei’s drone strategy, the Ministry of National Defence and state-owned National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, which organised June’s drone expo, are tasked with partnering with contractors to produce military-grade drones.

Under a parallel initiative, the Ministry of Economic Affairs is coordinating a program to help the private sector build and sell “dual-use” drones, which serve commercial as well as military purposes, for both the local and overseas markets.

Taiwanese President William Lai Ching-te has expressed his wish for Taiwan to become an “Asian hub” for drone technology and manufacturing.

For Taiwan, the bid to become a drone powerhouse is a race againstt time.

United States Admiral Philip Davidson, commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, has estimated that the PLA will be capable of invading Taiwan by 2027.

Despite the pressing need for a formidable drone force, Taiwan’s progress at building up its domestic industry has been uneven at best, experts say, with the problems beginning with overly modest targets that do not match the scale of the threat.

Taiwan has set a target for local industry to produce 15,000 dual-use drones a month by 2028, while the Defence Ministry has ordered 700 military-grade unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and 3,422 dual-use drones from local manufacturers, according to figures from the government-backed Research Institute for Democracy, Society, and Emerging Technology (DSET).

Taiwan also ordered approximately 1,000 UAVs from the US in 2024 and set a new target in May to procure another 47,000 drones over the next four years.

The newer procurement figures have yet to be accounted for in the national budget, which means they are subject to possible change.

Despite the expanded targets, the figures – particularly of military-grade UAVs – are small by the standards of modern warfare, according to defence experts.

During the opening volleys of a conflict with China, Taipei and Beijing would be expected to “churn through thousands of UAVs on a daily, if not hourly, basis”, according to an April report by the US Naval Institute.

The report estimated that Taiwan’s recent purchase of 291 Altius-600M UAVs, 685 Switchblade loitering munitions, and 4 MQ-9B drones – part of a $21bn backlog in military orders with the US government – would sustain just four to five volleys against the PLA.

Speaking at a DSET summit on supply chain resilience in Taipei last month, Peter Mattis, president of the US-based Jamestown Foundation, said Taiwan needed to think on a much bigger scale to meet its training and stockpile needs.

“Maybe it’s appropriate to be thinking about hundreds [of drones] while you’re trying to test things out, but we need to be burning through those, running them through their paces, so that we know when we do scale … we’re actually getting something that can stand the test,” Mattis said.

Yurii Poita, head of the Asia Pacific section at the Kyiv-based Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, noted that Ukraine plans to manufacture 200,000 a month in 2025, which is about “the same number as Taiwan wants to [produce] over one year”.

Ukrainian brigades burn through 50 to 100 first-person view drones (FPV) – which give the pilot a real-time view of the battlefield – each day, Poita told Al Jazeera.

Taiwan needs to be prepared to pivot and adapt as it builds its arsenal, including by paying attention to developments in Russia and Ukraine, said Misha Lu, a drone expert at the Taiwanese startup Tron Future.

“In Ukraine and Russia, drones have already evolved beyond the mere purpose of reconnaissance and strikes,” Lu told Al Jazeera.

“In Taiwan’s case, military drone applications have not been so diverse yet.

“Simply put, the Taiwanese military needs to speed up the process of figuring out the role of anti-drone tech in its defence planning and training,” Lu said.

Still, experts disagree about where exactly Taiwan should be placing its focus, given the wide variety of drone types and its limited resources.

While a lot of attention has been paid to stopping PLA from landing on Taiwan, there has not been enough discussion of what would happen next, said Lorenz Meier, the founder and CEO of the drone software company Auterion, who argues that Taipei’s drone strategy should take advantage of Taiwan’s unique geography.

Taiwan is split down its length by the Central Mountain Range, with most of its towns and cities – many of which largely consist of low-rise concrete buildings designed to withstand earthquakes – located on the west coast.

About 60 percent of the island is covered in dense evergreen subtropical forest.

“I’m in full favour of pushing USV right now; it also sends a message to China. This is important,” Meier told Al Jazeera on the sidelines of the Su’ao Bay drone expo, where Auterion signed a partnership with the NCSIST.

“But at the same time, there needs to be, eventually, conversation around the defence strategy, and the fact that we’re not talking about a realistic urban combat scenario shows that there is work to be done.

“I’ve never seen the government talk extensively about using the hills,” Meier added.

“If you retreat a force into the jungle, and if you launch drones out of the hills, that is going to be hell to sit at the beach.”

Alexander Huang, the chairman of Taiwan’s Council on Strategic and Wargaming Studies and a member of the opposition Kuomintang, said Taipei’s strategy has focused on building an arsenal to the detriment of considering how to deploy it in a conflict.

“A smart way is for Taiwan to go is to review the specifics of the Taiwan contingency and Taiwan theatre and figure out the operational tempo of the People’s Liberation Army and come up with a kind of drone development strategy with Taiwanese characteristics, rather than just copying the Ukraine model or following the advice of the Pentagon,” Huang told Al Jazeera.

Taiwan’s Defence Ministry did not reply to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.

Some of Taipei’s shortsightedness comes from a lack of recent combat experience, according to Jason Wang, the COO of ingeniSPACE, a geospatial intelligence company with offices in Taiwan.

“Taiwan can produce any hardware that you could possibly imagine and do it cheaply. Modern warfare is not about the hardware. It’s about putting the brains in the drones to give the warfighter options on the battlefield,” Wang told Al Jazeera.

“Understanding the role that different drones play on the battlefield, the logistics necessary to get them there, and the speed of violence necessary to stop your adversary is what Taiwanese manufacturers have a hard time mastering,” Wang added.

“For Taiwan, mastery of the battlefield is a function of political will, not capability.”

Taiwan has for decades dealt with Chinese aggression in the form of “grey-zone” tactics – low-grade activity occupying the space between peace and conflict – but has not fought a military battle with Beijing since the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis.

Taipei and Beijing have been at odds since the 1940s, when the Republic of China (ROC) government lost the Chinese Civil War to communist forces.

In 1949, ROC leader Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan, an erstwhile Japanese colony, pledging to one day return to the mainland.

After losing dozens of allies during the Cold War, including the US in 1979, Taiwan is today recognised by just 11 countries and the Holy See.

Its diplomatic isolation means it cannot officially engage with neighbouring militaries or UN peacekeeping missions.

Joint military exercises with the US, Taiwan’s main security guarantor, have been held on an unofficial basis without any announcement, to avoid angering China.

For the same reason, while the US has pledged to provide Taiwan with the means to defend itself, successive governments in Washington have stopped short of saying whether it would directly intervene in a conflict.

Taiwan’s military, a symbol of state repression during four decades of martial law that lasted until 1987, has undergone significant investment and modernisation in recent years.

After Taiwan transitioned to democracy in the early 1990s, the military underwent a period of neglect until the election of President Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progress Party in 2016, according to Michael Hunzeker, an associate professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.

The DPP saw the military largely as a “tool of authoritarian oppression”, Hunzeker told Al Jazeera, while the opposition KMT did not want to build up military power because it was seeking rapprochement with Beijing.

Under Tsai and her successor, Lai, Taiwan began to dramatically scale up military spending.

In 2025, Taiwan’s cabinet allocated defence spending equal to 2.45 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) – up from spending equivalent to 1.82 percent of GDP in 2016 – a budget that was later scaled down by the opposition-controlled legislature.

Lai has said he ultimately wants to raise spending this year to 3 percent of GDP, though his plans face opposition from the KMT.

Nonetheless, China’s military, the world’s largest in terms of personnel, still dwarves Taiwan’s forces.

China’s military ranked 3rd in the 2025 Global Firepower Index, which measures the defence capabilities of global militaries, far ahead of Taiwan’s military at 22nd.

Since 2022, the PLA has conducted regular large-scale military exercises in the Taiwan Strait, including drills with drones.

China does not have an embassy in Taipei, but its embassies in Washington, DC and Tokyo did not respond to requests for comment.

Taiwanese drone makers say that access to real-world and timely battlefield intelligence will be essential to designing the best drones for Taiwan and potential clients overseas.

“Our weak points are that we need to adapt to the conditions on the battlefield that change daily. We need to know the conditions to adapt software,” Gene Su, general manager of Taiwanese toymaker-turned-drone manufacturer Thunder Tiger, told Al Jazeera.

“We need to work with people in the US, and the front line in Europe to make sure we understand their needs, and then they adapt the software.”

Taiwanese manufacturers are also aware of the challenge they face from their commercial competitors.

China is skilled at both making drones and conducting “electronic warfare” capable of jamming enemy drones and misleading anti-drone systems, said Sunny Cheung, a Washington-based DSET fellow and analyst at the Jamestown Foundation.

“All [drone makers] share the same concerns that the Chinese anti-drone and electronic warfare capability are very good, so they are not sure in a real-time combat scenario whether Taiwanese drones can infiltrate … and conduct military operations,” Cheung told Al Jazeera, outlining the results of an informal survey of CEOs at Taiwan’s largest commercial and military manufacturers.

Taipei has been moving to address some of these potential vulnerabilities.

Taiwanese Minister of National Defence Wellington Koo – the first civilian to hold the role in a decade – recently announced that the military would commission its first-ever army drone unit, while UAVs and USVs would also be added to the navy.

Observers such as the DSET say establishing a UAV/USV task force this year to “facilitate a more coordinated approach” to procurement, subsidies, budgeting, and research and development is another step in the right direction, but other logistical and economic challenges remain.

Much of Taiwan’s drone strategy depends on its companies finding overseas partners to help drive demand for drones and build up the supply chain.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs recently launched an initiative to connect Taiwanese companies with customers in Japan, Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic and elsewhere who are looking to cut China out of their supply chains.

For now, export figures remain low, although the industry is gaining momentum.

From exporting just 290 drones in 2023, Taiwan exported 3,473 drones in 2024 and 3,426 drones in the first quarter of 2025 alone.

The program’s Achilles heel, according to experts, may lie in supply chain bottlenecks and the financial risks facing would-be drone makers.

Some would-be drone makers fear a similar fate as US company Skydio, which was sanctioned by China in 2024 for selling drones to Taiwan, according to Hong-Lun Tiunn, a DSET non-resident fellow and co-author of the June report.

Tiunn and his DSET colleague Fang said the government needs to offer more financial incentives to manufacturers to offset their concerns.

“As a private company, their first priority is to make a profit,” Fang told AL Jazeera. “Are they going to be punished by the Chinese government and lose all their clients?”

Chia-yu Chang, business development manager at Taiwanese drone designer Avilon Group, voiced similar concerns.

“It’s not just supporting drone companies; they need to support the entire ecosystem in order to have a Taiwanese drone brand. But I think there are still a lot of stages that need to come right,” Chang told Al Jazeera.

Chang said private companies are also struggling to completely remove China from their supply chains.

“Most of the commercial companies, most of the industry, cares only about data or security issues, but for the military, they would want to have the entire drone have zero Chinese parts,” she said.

“Honestly, nobody can do that.”

Taiwan relies on China for many of the raw materials and the parts needed to produce UAV batteries.

The island is similarly dependent on imports to meet its demand for GPS modules, flight control and positioning software, sensors, cameras, and secure communication chips, according to the DSET report.

Some technology, such as thermal imaging, is also subject to US export controls despite Taipei’s close ties to Washington.

Often, these imports are more expensive than Chinese-made parts, even if they are from friendly countries, according to the DSET, with a single component like an SDR video transmission chip costing as much as 10 times the price offered by DJI.

In response to questions about its supply chain, the NCSIST said Taiwan is working towards self-sufficiency.

“For military-grade UAVs, key components like high-power engines, precision navigation systems, and advanced sensors still depend on foreign markets due to Taiwan’s relatively late start in defence industry development,” the NCSIST told Al Jazeera.

“However, NCSIST is addressing this by developing critical indigenous technologies (eg, flight control computers, EO equipment, radar), gradually reducing reliance on foreign suppliers,” it said.

Meanwhile, as the clock ticks down to 2027, observers say Taiwan needs to move fast.

“This is our war. This is not somebody else’s war,” the KMT’s Huang said, adding that there is a “question mark” over whether Taiwan can implement an effective drone strategy.

“This is not just [a case of] putting money on the table and saying we are fine,” he said.