Taiwan Makes Its Own Weapons: The Indigenous Defense Industry and Its Strategic Logic
Taiwan cannot always buy what it needs. Major defense suppliers limit what they will sell to avoid diplomatic friction with China. American export control legislation restricts the transfer of sensitive technologies. Treaty allies of China will not sell Taiwan weapons at all. The result of these constraints, accumulated over decades, is that Taiwan has been forced to develop a domestic defense industrial base capable of producing the systems it cannot obtain externally — and in several categories, the systems it has developed domestically are among the most important in its order of battle.
The National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology is the primary institution through which Taiwan’s indigenized defense production operates. NCSIST — sometimes compared to Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems in its role as the state defense research and production authority — develops, tests, and produces missiles, drones, torpedoes, and electronic systems that Taiwan cannot reliably source from abroad. The institute’s budget has grown substantially as the threat environment has intensified and as the political consensus around serious defense investment has strengthened.
The Hsiung Feng anti-ship missile family is the most strategically significant product of Taiwan’s indigenous defense industry. The HF-2, a subsonic sea-skimming anti-ship missile roughly comparable to the Harpoon, and the HF-3, a supersonic ramjet-powered anti-ship missile with performance characteristics that have generated serious analytical attention, are both produced domestically in quantities that provide Taiwan with a meaningful coastal defense capability that does not depend on foreign supply. The HF-3 in particular — with its supersonic terminal approach, its relatively long range, and its mobile land-based launcher — represents the kind of high-end anti-ship capability that fits the asymmetric defense concept and that Taiwan can produce, maintain, and replenish from domestic production without waiting for foreign deliveries that may face political or logistical delay.
The Sky Bow surface-to-air missile system, Taiwan’s domestically developed air defense, provides a complement to the American Patriot systems that are part of Taiwan’s layered air defense architecture. Having a domestic air defense production capability means that attrition of air defense missiles during a conflict does not immediately produce a consumption crisis that can only be solved by resupply from abroad. Taiwan can replenish its air defense missiles from domestic production, subject to the production rate that NCSIST’s manufacturing capacity supports.
The drone program has become one of the most actively expanding elements of Taiwan’s indigenous defense industry, partly in response to the Ukrainian conflict’s demonstration of what unmanned systems can accomplish in a contested environment at relatively low cost. Taiwan has announced ambitions for domestic drone production at scales that would allow both military use and potential export, with the explicit goal of deterring a PLA operation through a drone threat that, like the Ukrainian experience with Bayraktars and FPV drones, imposes costs on an adversary at a price point that large-scale attrition can sustain.
The strategic value of the indigenous defense industry exceeds the specific capabilities it produces. A Taiwan that depends entirely on foreign weapons supply for its defense is vulnerable to supplier decisions — political choices in Washington, Tokyo, or elsewhere to limit or delay deliveries in a crisis — that Taiwan cannot control. A Taiwan with domestic production capability can sustain its defense through a blockade or a crisis that cuts external supply, at least for the period that domestic stockpiles of raw materials and components support continued production. The supply chain for domestically produced weapons is shorter and less subject to external disruption than the supply chain for imported systems.
Taiwan’s defense industry will never be self-sufficient for the full range of capabilities it needs. The point is not self-sufficiency. It is reducing the degree to which Taiwan’s defense depends on political decisions made in other capitals by governments with their own constraints and considerations. Every capability that Taiwan can produce domestically is a capability that Beijing cannot interdict by pressuring Taiwan’s suppliers.