The war in Ukraine has proven the merits of retired admiral Lee Hsi-min’s plan for asymmetric war. Now it’s time for Taiwan’s president to force her reluctant generals to follow the plan.
Before his retirement in 2019, former Taiwanese admiral and chief of the general staff Lee Hsi-min gifted his nation with a labor of love — a realistic plan for how Taiwan can use its limited budget to defend itself against an overwhelming invasion force. The plan is called the Overall Defense Concept.
The Overall Defense Concept is a very logical plan that takes China’s recent military buildup very seriously. In a discussion of the plan published in September 2021, Lee explained why the plan is very different from Taiwan’s previous defense planning: “Taiwan faces an existential threat. Given the extreme imbalance in defense resources across the Strait, Taiwan will fail if we continue to use traditional ways to resist the threat from China. For Taiwan, it is no longer a question of whether we need to change or not. If we want to survive, and if we want to successfully defend Taiwan, we must change. This is a matter of life and death.”
The new plan reluctantly acknowledges the ongoing need for expensive legacy weapons like fighter jets, large radar stations and large warships to counter China’s “gray zone warfare.” Gray zone warfare is the term given to China’s new strategy of exhausting Taiwan militarily and economically. It includes tactics like regularly sending large numbers of attack jets and bombers to fly very close to the borders of Taiwan’s air defense zones. China is now also increasingly doing the same with its warships near Taiwan’s coastline. This forces Taiwan to be on constant alert for a sudden strike against its vulnerable radars and defensive systems. It also means that Taiwan has to spend millions of dollars on fuel and maintenance to scramble its fighter jets and warships to intercept and shadow the threatening intruders.
Lee states that to effectively counter gray zone aggression, Taiwan needs high-profile, advanced, traditional platforms and weapons. He says that the problem is that these systems are expensive and would likely not survive the first two stages of China’s most likely invasion plan — a massive guided-missile barrage followed by aerial bombardments. Expensive fighter jets, tanks and other large weapon systems would be too easy to destroy in the initial stages, so they are not suitable weapons for countering a full-scale invasion. Lee added that “a full-scale invasion is an existential threat — gray-zone operations are not.”
He then describes what Taiwan needs to focus on to survive the existential threat: “To effectively address the threat of a full-scale invasion, Taiwan needs highly survivable and resilient asymmetric capabilities — large numbers of small, dispersed, mobile, and lethal weapons.” Lee says these low-cost, small, asymmetric weapons are very cost effective, and they can be installed in short time frames, even though they might not be as effective to counter gray-zone operations in peacetime.
The essence of asymmetric capabilities, Lee says, “is to have a large number of small things.” These weapons must be highly survivable and lethal on the battlefield. Being small, mobile and dispersed, they might not attract much attention in peacetime, but in wartime they can be a game changer that decides life or death. Even if the enemy knows about their existence, it should be extremely hard to locate, attack, and destroy them.
This type of small but lethal weapon is perfectly illustrated by the shoulder-fired Stinger missile, which can turn the skies over Taiwan into a deathtrap for the Chinese air force, thereby severely diminishing China’s chances of successfully landing enough troops on Taiwanese soil.
Lee proceeds to list the types of asymmetric weapons Taiwan should invest in. These include weapons that Ukraine’s civilian forces used to great effect, such as man-portable anti-air missiles like Stingers and man-portable anti-armor missiles like Javelins. High on the list are also sea mines and fast minelayers, small stealth missile corvettes (such as are currently being built in Taiwan), coastal defense missile systems like Taiwan’s recent order of Harpoon coastal defense missiles, precision-guided multiple launch rocket systems (like the HIMARS units that Taiwan is currently looking at buying in larger numbers). Also on the list are items like mobile intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance (ISTAR) systems, and electronic warfare systems.
During his tenure, Lee also launched a Taiwan-based project to build dozens of “micro missile assault boats”. The initial project called for the design and construction of 60 small 28-meter-long boats fitted with anti-ship missiles. These small, mobile and deadly craft fitted perfectly within the concept of asymmetric warfare, but the project was put on hold immediately by Lee’s successor when he retired and eventually canceled in 2021. One of the possible reasons for this cancellation is that most of Taiwan’s top brass want to keep buying big and shiny legacy systems, as mentioned at the end of this article.
The Overall Defense Concept also calls for Taiwan to start investing in better training of its military personnel and in effective training programs for civilians, who should be organized into an effective territorial defense force, like that of Ukraine. Lee says Taiwan’s civilians — including young people — would be much more likely to fight if their government could provide the training, equipment and organizational structure required. A well-trained civilian force could hamper invasion forces greatly and thus act as yet another deterrent for Beijing to consider. He emphasizes that such a force must be organized by the government, not cobbled together piecemeal by various civil society actors.
Analyst Michael A. Hunzeker, assistant professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy, agrees that the Overall Defense Concept is of cardinal importance for Taiwan, stating that “In this concept, Taiwan’s armed forces finally had a logical blueprint to help them to survive a first strike and wage a prolonged, decentralized, and multilayered campaign of attrition.”
But Hunzeker pointed out that while the Concept was embraced while Admiral Lee was in charge, it quickly lost influence when he retired in 2019: “Unfortunately, the Overall Defense Concept was more popular with American analysts and officials than it was with currently serving Taiwanese generals and admirals. Driven by personal animosity and the fact that true asymmetry undercuts the rationale for pursuing high-profile, high-prestige, and high-cost weapons, these military leaders and civilian enablers purged the Overall Defense Concept as soon as Lee retired. There are rumors that the ministry has even banned senior officers from using the term and that message has trickled down into the junior ranks.”
The recent launching of Taiwan’s huge amphibious landing ship, the Yushan, seems to show what Hunzeker was getting at. The first of four such warships, the Yushan is a towering behemoth designed to land a small force of troops and amphibious assault vehicles on some distant beach. Being a massive target, it seems unlikely that the Yushan (or its three planned sister ships) would have much chance of surviving the first day of the invasion, let alone survive for long enough to sail anywhere to deposit its small force.
One sign that the success of asymmetric war in Ukraine might be changing minds in Taiwan’s military is the fact that the top brass is now looking at buying a large number of America’s HIMARS missile trucks that can fire guided missiles with great accuracy at invasion forces. These highly mobile precision strike weapons are exactly what the Overall Defense Concept is begging for. One can only hope that Taiwan will buy more of these asymmetrical weapons and less shiny sitting ducks in the future. Less expensive tanks, and more tank-killer missiles like the Javelin. Less expensive fighter jets, and more jet-killer missiles like the Stinger.
As explained in our article last week, dispersed teams armed with Stingers could by themself severely blunt a Chinese air bombardment, protecting Taiwan’s asymmetrical assets while shooting down China’s air assault troops in their transport helicopters and planes. Employed in large enough numbers and spread out in hiding places all over Taiwan, this missile could force China to abort an aerial assault, which could in turn force China to abort plans for an amphibious landing — thereby ending the entire invasion.
Image: U.S. Navy
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