The Fighter Gap: Taiwan's Air Force and the Battle It Cannot Win Conventionally
Taiwan’s air force operates approximately 400 combat aircraft, including upgraded F-16A/Bs, the domestically developed Indigenous Defense Fighter, and a dwindling number of older French Mirage 2000s. Against it stands the People’s Liberation Army Air Force, which fields approximately 2,000 combat aircraft including fifth-generation J-20 stealth fighters, advanced Su-35s acquired from Russia, and large numbers of fourth-generation J-10 and J-16 multirole fighters that outperform Taiwan’s F-16s in some performance parameters. The numerical imbalance is significant. The qualitative gap, when the J-20 enters the calculation, is severe. Taiwan’s air force cannot achieve air superiority over the strait in a sustained conventional air campaign against the PLAAF.
This assessment is not a reason to abandon Taiwan’s air force. It is a reason to think clearly about what the air force is actually for. Air superiority — the ability to freely operate aircraft throughout a contested airspace while denying the enemy the same — is a goal that Taiwan’s force size and the geographic reality of operating within range of mainland-based PLAAF aircraft makes unachievable. What is achievable is air denial: imposing enough cost on PLAAF operations over Taiwan and in the strait that China cannot operate freely, cannot provide uncontested close air support to a crossing force, and cannot eliminate Taiwan’s surface-based air defenses through air action alone. Denial is not victory. It is a contribution to making the overall defense costly enough to matter.
The F-16 upgrade program — the F-16V configuration that Taiwan has been pursuing — is the primary investment in maintaining relevance in the air combat domain. The upgrades include an Active Electronically Scanned Array radar, improved avionics, and compatibility with advanced American air-to-air missiles that give the upgraded aircraft a beyond-visual-range engagement capability that is competitive with most PLAAF aircraft it would face. The J-20, with its stealth characteristics, presents a different problem — an aircraft that can approach within weapons range before being detected by the radar the F-16V carries represents a qualitative challenge that upgrades to the F-16 cannot fully address.
Taiwan’s aircraft survivability problem is at least as acute as its capability problem. Air bases are fixed, known, and targetable. The PLA Rocket Force’s inventory of ballistic and cruise missiles can strike every Taiwanese air base in the opening hours of a conflict. Aircraft in the open or in conventional hangars are vulnerable to these strikes. Taiwan has invested in hardened aircraft shelters capable of protecting fighters from near-miss ballistic missile detonations, but the density of PLA missile attacks in a first strike scenario — hundreds of missiles aimed at a small number of fixed air bases — creates penetration probabilities that even hardened shelters cannot reduce to zero.
The survivability answer that the Taiwan Air Force has been developing is dispersal — the ability to operate from highway airstrips and non-standard operating locations that the PLA cannot target as efficiently as the main air bases. Taiwan’s road network includes stretches of highway designed and maintained to serve as emergency runways, and the air force has practiced operations from these locations. Dispersal increases survivability at the cost of logistics complexity: aircraft operating from highway strips require forward-deployed maintenance, fuel, and weapons that the normal base infrastructure provides automatically. The tradeoff is manageable but requires preparation that is ongoing.
The air force’s most important contribution to Taiwan’s defense may ultimately be measured not in aircraft kills but in the cost it imposes on PLAAF operations through attrition — forcing the PLAAF to expend air-to-air missiles and to maintain a defensive posture over the strait that reduces sorties available for offensive missions — and in the protection it provides to Taiwan’s surface-based air defense systems by forcing PLAAF aircraft to operate at ranges and altitudes that reduce their effectiveness against those systems.
An air force that cannot achieve air superiority is not useless. It is a force that must be used for different objectives than the ones its pilots were trained to accomplish. The adjustment is strategic as much as it is tactical.