Taiwan needs a smarter arms procurement strategy to deter China

In April, US President Joe Biden signed three emergency supplemental spending bills into law, including one focused on the Indo-Pacific, commonly known as the Taiwan aid bill. The new legislation aims in part to address the roughly $19.7 billion backlog in U.S. arms sales to Taiwan — a hot-button issue given China's increasingly provocative military activities around Taiwan and the perception among some American analysts that Taiwan is not really a priority. as Washington claims.

Taiwan relies on the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program for most of its U.S. weapons acquisitions, which typically requires manufacturing major weapons systems from scratch. All FMS sales above a certain threshold – $14 million in Taiwan's case – must be notified to Congress, which can vote to block the sale, although it has never succeeded in doing so. The FMS bureaucratic process is relatively slow by design, and some delay between notification to Congress and implementation is to be expected. Yet Taiwan often finds itself waiting longer than other countries to obtain the same American weapons.

In June 2017, for example, Congress received notification of the sale to Taiwan of 56 AGM-154C Joint Standoff Weapons, guided bombs that use onboard wings to glide toward their targets. The contract to produce the bomb was awarded last February, nearly seven years after Congress notified it. By the time the bombs are expected to be delivered in March 2028, it will have taken Taiwan nearly 11 years to receive the purchased weapons.

Such delays may not seem significant in peacetime, but they could become disastrous in the not-so-distant future. The so-called Davidson window, during which the US Department of Defense estimates that the Chinese military will be ready to attack Taiwan, begins in 2027. Perhaps no munitions will be more critical for Taiwan's self-defense in This scenario than the anti-ship missile, which Taipei would need large numbers of men to attack Chinese warships and civilian ships that could bring an invasion force ashore. Ground-based anti-ship missiles carried by trucks are particularly valuable to Taiwan given their mobility, making it more difficult for China to target them.

In October 2020, Congress received notice of a nearly $2.4 billion FMS package for the delivery of 100 truck-mounted Harpoon launchers and 400 missiles to Taiwan, which was followed by an agreement in September 2022 with an estimated value of $355 million for 60 air-launched Harpoons. But it took two and a half years from the initial notification for Washington to award the first contracts for this work. Taiwan will likely receive these Harpoon missiles in installments, but the weapons will not be delivered in full until 2030, well after the Davidson window begins.

It is difficult to identify the root cause of Taiwan's arms lag with the available data. Congressional notifications regarding arms sales are easy to find, but other steps in the FMS process are not routinely made public. Simply knowing the dates of the signed letter and offer of acceptance (LOA), contract award, and initial and final delivery of a particular FMS purchase would provide a more accurate picture of the reasons for which delays occur. Any future reforms to the process should include transparency measures to help researchers and policymakers identify the sources of delays for FMS beneficiaries.

U.S. bureaucracy alone cannot explain why Taiwan waits so much longer than other countries to obtain the same weapons. It is possible that the internal payment process in Taiwan may spoil the work. Purchases of foreign military equipment must be approved by Taiwan's Legislative Yuan before an LOA can be signed, meaning legislative delays could create a ripple effect when finalizing contracts with U.S. companies.

Pressures on the U.S. defense industrial base are also likely exacerbating the backlog. The COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's war in Ukraine have highlighted bottlenecks and capacity gaps in the sector. This has already happened with Taiwan, which reportedly canceled an FMS filing for Paladin self-propelled howitzers in 2022 due to production delays. The problem won't go away anytime soon, as many of the munitions in Taiwan's weapons stockpile are in high demand by Ukraine and other FMS customers.

However, the recent Taiwan aid bill will facilitate the use of Presidential Withdrawal Authority (PDA), which allows Washington to remove weapons from its own military stockpiles and immediately transfer them to a foreign country . Because PDA transfers come from existing stockpiles, there is no wait time for manufacturing, allowing the United States to provide support more quickly when needed.

At first glance, PDA transfers appear to be an attractive option to reduce the extent of Taiwan's lag. It is clear that the US government also views them as such: in late 2022, Congress amended the Foreign Assistance Act to authorize $1 billion per fiscal year for PDA transfers to Taiwan, and additional legislation passed in April allocates $1.9 billion to the Department of Defense to fund PDA transfers to Taiwan. replenish all weapons stockpiles it sends to Taiwan via PDA for fiscal years 2024 and 2025.

But the impact of the new legislation will likely be limited, primarily because the PDA does not allow Biden to transfer equipment that the U.S. military does not already have in its stockpile. The three largest arms sales delays in terms of monetary value — all made by the Trump administration and accounting for $12.4 billion, or nearly two-thirds of the delay — consist of equipment that the U.S. military does not not have on hand. The largest of these concerns 66 F-16 Block 70/72 aircraft, valued at $8 billion. The US Air Force operates more than 1,000 F-16s, but this fleet does not include the variant purchased by Taiwan.

Likewise, the United States does not have Harpoon coastal defense systems in its stockpiles. When Washington announced in June 2022 that it would send truck-mounted harpoons to Ukraine, it did so through the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative instead of the PDA, because no system was available for the withdrawal. (The United States has also used the PDA to assist Ukraine, sending an estimated $23.8 billion in equipment through this method since August 2021.)

Washington may have better luck with the Abrams tanks, which constitute Taiwan's third-largest overdue arms sale, worth $2 billion. The United States has many Abrams, but the model sold to Taiwan, the M1A2T, has unique subsystems. Taiwan might receive less capable tanks sooner via PDA, but the first tranche of its newly built Abrams tanks are supposed to arrive later this year, so it's probably best to wait a few more months.

The United States could use PDA transfers to reduce other parts of Taiwan's weapons stockpile, but in many cases Washington would discover that its defense industry already has contracts to produce the weapons in question, as c This is the case for HIMARS artillery rocket launchers, MQ-9B drones and several types of missiles and munitions. If Washington could use PDA to transfer these weapons to Taiwan now instead of waiting until the defense industry has finished manufacturing new systems, it would raise difficult questions about the fate of these contracts. Would the US military receive the contract weapons instead of Taiwan? Or would the contracts be canceled?

Theoretically, Taiwan could benefit from a double dip: obtaining weapons via PDA transfers in the short term while maintaining contracts to obtain more of the same weapons in the long term. This would be a good thing for building up its military stocks, particularly ammunition. However, if Taiwan still waits for FMS records to be satisfied, the extent of the arms backlog will not change.

It is clear that PDA transfers may not be the most effective way to reduce the armament backlog. However, if deployed intelligently, they can play a valuable role in moving Taiwan toward an asymmetric defense posture and improving its self-defense capabilities. Asymmetric defense, also known as the porcupine strategy, uses a large number of smaller, less complex abilities to counter a stronger opponent. For Taiwan, less costly capabilities such as drones, anti-ship missiles, and surface-to-air missiles could prevent China from achieving the air and sea superiority it would need to invade the island.

To this end, the United States should emphasize PDA transfers for certain categories of weapons. Taiwan needs more munitions and missiles of all types, but especially ground-based anti-aircraft and anti-ship weapons. It expects several types of missiles, including Patriot interceptors, Harpoons and Stingers. Ammunition poses another risk of double-dipping, as Taiwan will inevitably need many reloads, and resupply would be difficult after the start of a conflict.

But Taiwan is reluctant to fully adopt an asymmetric defense strategy, and the balance of weapons lag favors traditional capabilities. Washington can use PDA transfers to signal the importance of asymmetric defense to Taipei and send relevant capabilities that are not currently sold through the FMS system. Good candidates for such transfers include sea mines; the Navy's remotely operated expeditionary ship interdiction system; and small unmanned aerial vehicles, such as the RQ-7, RQ-20, and Switchblade loitering munition.

The PDA funding in the Taiwan aid bill is not a silver bullet to Taiwan's arms sales problems. Instead of viewing PDA transfers as a tool to reduce the backlog, policymakers should view them as an instrument to build munitions stockpiles and push Taiwan toward a more effective and sustainable defense strategy. The presidential withdrawal authorization might be a good band-aid for getting weapons to Taiwan, but addressing the long wait times Taipei faces will require other solutions.