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 most important battle in a Taiwan conflict may be fought before the first missile is launched, on platforms that do not appear in military order-of-battle assessments, by actors who are never uniformed and never identifiable. China’s information operations against Taiwan are not a supplement to its military strategy. They are the precondition for making the military strategy work. A Taiwanese population that has been sufficiently demoralized, divided, and confused about what is actually happening and who can be trusted is a population that provides less political support for resistance, less capacity for civil defense mobilization, and less coherent pressure on allied governments to intervene.

Taiwan’s military has a personnel problem that its equipment purchases cannot solve. The active force — approximately 165,000 personnel across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines — is designed for a conventional defense posture that the island’s strategic situation may not support. The reserve force, nominally numbering in the millions, is trained to a standard that multiple independent assessments have described as inadequate for the dispersed, mobile operations that Taiwan’s actual defense requirements would demand. The gap between the military on paper and the military that can fight is the most urgent operational readiness problem Taiwan faces, and it is one that requires sustained political will rather than procurement decisions to address.