The porcupine strategy for Taiwan is the right strategy. Taipei should procure large quantities of asymmetric weapons, train its reserves seriously, harden its infrastructure, and prepare for a war of attrition that bleeds an invader rather than meeting him on the beach. American analysts have argued this for over a decade. Taiwanese officials have agreed with the argument in principle, repeatedly. The procurement record tells a different story.

Taiwan continues to prioritize prestige platforms over distributed lethality. The F-16V upgrade program, while sensible, absorbs budget that could buy thousands of Stingers. Submarine indigenization, an enormously expensive undertaking, is not the highest-marginal-utility investment for an island that may face a strait crossing. Surface combatants in the Taiwanese inventory will not survive the first hour of a contested strait operation. The procurement pattern is recognizably that of a conventional state defense ministry, not a porcupine in waiting.

Taiwan’s defense establishment has been conducting an argument with itself for most of the past decade about what kind of military it needs. On one side: advocates of conventional deterrence, who want advanced fighter aircraft, large surface combatants, and the visible symbols of military capability that signal to Beijing that Taiwan can fight and to Washington that Taiwan is a serious defense partner. On the other side: advocates of asymmetric or “porcupine” defense, who argue that Taiwan cannot match PLA conventional capability in a symmetric competition and that investing in high-cost platforms that the PLA can destroy on the ground before they are ever used is strategically incoherent.