Taiwan and the Lessons from Ukraine

My latest piece for the Lowy Institute explores just some of the lessons that the government of Taiwan is learning from its observations of the war in Ukraine.

My latest article for the Lowy Interpreter is an examination of what Taiwan is learning from the war in Ukraine. My article is based on a research visit to Taiwan, other research since the visit and a recent interview with the Taiwanese representative in Australia, Mr Douglas Hsu.

In the nearly three years since Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine of February 2022, many nations have re-examined their national security postures, defence budgets and alliances. The government of Taiwan has not been immune to the strategic reassessments driven by Russia’s conduct. The Ukraine war has served as a catalyst to address some complacency in sections of Taiwanese society about Chinese aggression.

Learning the right lessons from other people’s wars requires deep analysis, political commitment to change, and national security organisations able to rapidly absorb knowledge. There is more to it than watching from afar and copying innovation. Taiwan needs to observe the political, strategic and tactical lessons of Ukraine and filter them through its own context, including local geography and weather, regional politics, Taiwan’s political culture, and the military capabilities of China. Taiwan also needs to anticipate the kinds of lessons the Chinese leadership and the People’s Liberation Army might be learning from Ukraine and Russia.

A key lesson for Taiwan in the past three years has been the maintenance of national will. This has political, military and societal elements. Significant effort has been invested to improve military and civil defence capacity, while expanding the interaction between the two. As Taiwan’s representative in Australia, Douglas Hsu, told me in a recent interview, the Taiwanese government has “strengthened civil defence capabilities, including mobilisation, human resource deployment, training, and emergency preparedness. This aims to ensure prompt response to emergencies or dynamic changes in disasters, enhancing civilians’ self-defence and self-rescue capabilities to maintain social safety and order.”

Military conscription has also evolved. With mandatory military service extended from four months to one year and the modernisation of training, Taiwan is developing a more capable military to deter Chinese aggression and provide a potent warfighting organisation if the Chinese blockade Taiwan or attempt invasion.

There are other Taiwanese initiatives to build national resilience based on insights from the Ukraine War. Hsu describes these as contributing to a “whole of society resilience”. Some of these initiatives include establishing a command and control system for emergencies to integrate different agencies; more frequent disaster response drills which incorporate reserve force training; enhancing storage of strategic materials and energy to deter or defeat a Chinese blockade; improving medical resilience; establishing air-raid shelters; and building a more robust and secure government communications network, including cyber security and undersea cable protection, to deter Chinese leadership “decapitation” operations. PLA expert Joel Wuthnow has written that a key PLA observation from Ukraine was Russia’s failure to decapitate Ukraine's leadership: “the PLA has already planned to target Taiwan’s leaders, including doctrine for the use of special operations forces in an island landing that includes strikes on adversary leadership.”

Perhaps one of the most important initiatives has been to strengthen protections around the flow of information. Russia, supported by China, has run a large global disinformation campaign since starting the war in Ukraine to shape opinion in the West, especially among politicians. In April, the chair of the US Congress House Intelligence Committee said Russian disinformation has “absolutely seeped its way to Congress” and that Republican members of Congress had repeated Russian claims.

You can read the full article for free here at the Lowy Interpreter.