For several years now, there has been much discussion about Taiwan’s “arms sales backlog.” For some, the backlog is the U.S.’s fault and is the reason why Taiwan hasn’t modernized its armed forces. Others paint this as an excuse and lay the blame back at the door of Taiwan’s government.
But what actually is the backlog?
At its simplest, the backlog is “weapons that the United States has announced that we are selling in Taiwan that have not arrived in Taiwan yet.”
That’s according to Eric Gomez, who runs the Taiwan Arms Sales Backlog tracker, a project that he started at the Cato Institute think tank in Washington and has now brought to the Taiwan Security Monitor, a student-powered research initiative at George Mason University.
This begs the question: What is the backlog not?
It is not just weapons that are “late.” It can’t be, because as soon as something is ordered it goes onto the backlog. So why does the backlog have such a negative reputation?
Many items on the backlog have been on there for a long time, even back to 2017 in some cases. That kind of delay is bad for Taiwan’s trust in American capacity to deliver weapons.
The second issue is the size of the backlog. Gomez’s tracker has the dollar amount at $21.5 billion as of February of this year. That’s slightly larger than Taiwan’s proposed defense budget for 2025, which was $19.5 billion (647 billion New Taiwan dollars) or 2.45% of GDP.
That number has been reduced by Taiwan’s opposition-controlled parliament, setting up a political showdown this summer, as Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) has said he wants to increase defense spending to 3% of GDP this year with an additional special budget.
Which, incidentally, could add up to $10 billion to the backlog.
Just because a weapons system is on the backlog, does not mean that Taiwan has already paid for it. This is another potential source of contention about the scale of the backlog.
When an arms sale is approved, Taiwan works out a payment plan with the United States Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which handles defense assistance and sales. Once a contract has been signed, Gomez says, at least an initial deposit will have been received in the U.S.
The problem for media and researchers is that most of this information is not made public. Arms sales are notified to Congress so we know that they go onto the backlog, but that is the only part of the process that is highly visible. The tracker team is also quite reliant on the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute arms transfer database.
When Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense or the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto U.S. embassy, says an arms delivery is or isn’t delayed, in theory they are referring to agreed upon timelines and delivery dates. But this information isn’t public, so it’s hard to know whether something is really slipping or not.
Why Are Sales Delayed?
There are multiple reasons why sales get delayed, says Gomez. It may simply be that other customers (countries) are already in a queue ahead of Taiwan to receive the same weapons. In some cases Taiwan may be buying systems that the U.S. had stopped making for itself so production lines take time to restart. (Why Taiwan would do this is a whole other article.)
Sometimes, unfortunately, budgetary processes are just slow. Taiwan got notified of the sale of the AGM-154C Joint Standoff Weapon in 2017, but a contract for the delivery of 50 of the glide bombs wasn’t signed until 2024!
These kinds of drawn out processes not only harm the Taiwanese armed forces’ modernization and current lethality, they also damage confidence in U.S. support for Taiwan. Taiwanese voters might well ask why the money they are spending is seeing such a slow return. And Chinese leaders might wonder whether the U.S. isn’t focused on arming Taiwan.
It is hard to be certain if Taiwan suffers more from a backlog than other U.S. customers. Gomez says the data is too messy, but he thinks it does have to wait longer. But he cautioned that Taiwan typically places much larger orders than other countries, so it may just be the case that there is a longer wait for a larger quantity. What makes Taiwan stand out is the size of the backlog relative to its overall military spending.
The elephant in the room here is of course that whereas most countries can buy arms from many different supplies of different nationalities, Taiwan cannot, so it has to deal solely with American contractors.
Sometimes this has meant those companies take advantage of their quasi-monopoly in Taiwan.
In the end, the headline figure of $21.5 billion is not what matters for the backlog. After all, supporters of Taiwan improving its defense should want the backlog to increase as more orders are made.
What matters is increasing the throughput, getting orders off the backend of the backlog and into the hands of Taiwanese troops.
One thing should be clear, though. The backlog cannot be an excuse for Taiwan to point to and say that it has already made improvements.
You are still waiting for the rest of those 400 Harpoon anti-ship missiles you ordered?
Tell me more about how you are increasing domestic capacity to produce more than 200 Hsiung Feng (雄風) II and III instead.
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