Civil Defense: Whether Taiwan's Population Is Ready for What Its Military Is Preparing For
Ukraine’s experience since February 2022 has produced a global reassessment of what civil defense means in a modern conflict involving a large, technologically capable adversary striking civilian infrastructure. The Ukrainian example is relevant to Taiwan not because the two situations are identical — they are quite different in geography, military balance, and the specific threats each faces — but because Ukraine demonstrated that societal resilience, the willingness and capacity of a civilian population to sustain normal life and maintain government function under sustained attack, is a military asset of the first order. Taiwan’s civil defense posture, measured against the Ukrainian example, has been improving from a low base and remains inadequate for the scenario its military is preparing to fight.
The specific vulnerabilities that a Taiwan civil defense system must address are the product of Taiwan’s geography and the nature of the likely conflict. An island with no land borders has no refugee corridor. Civilians who cannot be protected in place cannot be evacuated, because there is nowhere to evacuate to. This is categorically different from Ukraine, where the western border provides an exit for the civilian population that the eastern and northern parts of the country cannot protect. Taiwan’s population of 23 million must be prepared to shelter in place, maintain essential services under attack, and sustain the social and political cohesion that resistance requires — because there is no alternative.
The shelter infrastructure is the most basic civil defense requirement and the one where Taiwan has the most visible deficit. Ukraine’s Soviet-era urban construction included substantial basement and underground shelter capacity that was pressed into service, imperfectly but consequentially, as Russian missile attacks on cities became routine. Taiwan’s urban infrastructure — denser, more modern, and largely constructed without civil defense requirements in mind — has less inherent shelter capacity per capita. The effort to identify, certify, and publicize available shelter locations has accelerated in recent years, with government applications and signage programs designed to ensure that the population knows where to go. The infrastructure is improving. It is not yet adequate.
Emergency stockpiles of food, water, medicine, and fuel at both government and household levels are the second layer of civil defense resilience. A population that has maintained two weeks or two months of essential supplies at home is substantially more resilient to supply chain disruption than one that depends on daily or weekly resupply through normal commercial channels. Taiwan’s government has begun encouraging household preparedness through public communication campaigns that are more explicit about the threat scenario than previous campaigns, which tended to frame emergency preparedness in terms of natural disasters. The shift to acknowledging the military threat explicitly, while politically sensitive, is more honest about the actual risk and produces preparedness behaviors that are more relevant to the scenario.
The telecommunications and information resilience problem is acute for reasons discussed in the cyber warfare context. A population that loses access to reliable information — about what is happening, about government decisions, about where to go and what to do — is a population whose civil defense capacity degrades rapidly. The effort to build communications resilience through satellite internet access, backup broadcasting capacity, and community-level communication networks that can function without centralized infrastructure has been expanded. Starlink and similar satellite internet services provide a layer of communications redundancy that is difficult to suppress short of physical attacks on ground stations.
The psychological dimension of civil defense is the hardest to assess and arguably the most important. Ukraine’s civil defense has been sustained by a population that has overwhelming reason to resist and a political leadership that has articulated that reason compellingly. Taiwan’s population, surveyed before 2022, showed relatively low willingness to fight in defense of the island — though surveys conducted after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and after China’s 2022 exercises showed measurable increases. The political culture that translates individual willingness into organized resistance — the civil society organizations, the local government structures, the community networks — is something Taiwan has in abundance given its democratic tradition.
Whether that culture produces effective civil defense under the pressure of an actual conflict is the question that only the conflict can answer. Taiwan is working to make the answer yes. It is not there yet.