Why Taiwan is buying missiles it may never fire — and why that is the point
Critics dismiss Taiwan's asymmetric arsenal as irrelevant against a Chinese blockade that could starve the island without a shot. But Taipei's missiles, mines, and drones are not designed to break a blockade — they are designed to ensure one never stays bloodless.
🎧 Listen to this article
The Porcupine’s Real Quills
Taiwan’s defence planners face an accusation that sounds devastating: why stockpile missiles when China can simply starve you into submission? A naval blockade — or its legally ambiguous cousin, the “quarantine” — would sever the island’s access to food, fuel, and semiconductors without a single amphibious landing craft touching shore. Firepower, in this reading, becomes a museum piece. Expensive, politically comforting, strategically inert.
The accusation misreads both the blockade and the missiles.
What Taiwan is building is not a conventional arsenal shrunk to fit a smaller budget. The Overall Defense Concept, introduced in 2017 by Admiral Lee Hsi-min, restructures the island’s entire theory of survival around a single wager: that distributed, mobile, cheap weapons can make every stage of Chinese coercion — blockade included — so costly that Beijing’s planners cannot isolate any one move from the risk of catastrophic escalation. Asymmetric firepower does not answer the blockade by breaking it. It answers the blockade by ensuring a blockade can never remain just a blockade.
Blockade as Theatre
Begin with what a Chinese blockade would actually require. The PLA’s 2006 Science of Campaigns textbook defines a “joint blockade campaign” as an offensive operation by Navy, Air Force, Second Artillery, and Army formations designed “to sever enemy economic and military connections.” This is not a coast guard checkpoint. It demands sustained air superiority over the Taiwan Strait, continuous anti-submarine patrols across multiple shipping lanes, and the suppression of Taiwanese radar and missile batteries that could threaten the cordon.
The distinction between a blockade and a quarantine matters enormously. A quarantine — law-enforcement vessels inspecting commercial traffic — sits below the threshold of armed conflict and avoids triggering the US Taiwan Relations Act’s military provisions. CSIS defines it as an operation “to control maritime or air traffic within a specific area” rather than a military campaign to cut supply lines entirely. Beijing would prefer the quarantine. It keeps escalation deniable. It exploits international law’s grey zones. It lets Chinese strategists frame coercion as administration.
But the quarantine has a structural flaw. It works only if Taiwan cooperates by not shooting. The moment Taiwanese anti-ship missiles sink a China Coast Guard cutter or a maritime militia trawler, the quarantine either escalates to a full military blockade — triggering precisely the international crisis Beijing wanted to avoid — or it collapses. Taiwan’s asymmetric arsenal exists to present Beijing with this dilemma before the first vessel is inspected.
Consider the operational geometry. Taiwan’s coastline stretches roughly 1,500 kilometres. The PLA Navy would need to enforce a perimeter across the entire Taiwan Strait and around the island’s eastern approaches — an area where the fractal complexity of coastline and island chains creates infinite pockets for mobile missile launchers, small fast-attack craft, and submarine ambushes. A perfect seal demands perfect awareness. Taiwan’s asymmetric strategy denies that awareness deliberately: dispersed launchers on unmarked trucks, minelaying from fishing boats, drone swarms launched from civilian infrastructure. The blockading fleet becomes a target-rich environment operating inside the engagement range of weapons it cannot locate.
This is where the question’s premise inverts. A blockade does not make firepower irrelevant. A blockade makes firepower devastating — because the blockading force must remain on station, predictable, visible, and within range.
Calorie Counts and Kill Chains
The vulnerability is real, though. Taiwan imports roughly 70% of its food and nearly all of its energy. The island’s food self-sufficiency rate hovers around 30%, a figure that drops further once fuel for tractors, refrigeration, and logistics is factored in. A sustained blockade of even moderate effectiveness would trigger what one analyst likened to a forced metabolic state transition — the island shifting from a modern industrial economy to something resembling wartime rationing within weeks, not months.
Defence Minister Wellington Koo understands this calculus. A former criminal defence lawyer who spent three decades representing politically persecuted activists under Taiwan’s authoritarian regime, Koo brings a litigator’s instinct for structural weakness. His reforms since taking office have prioritised what the 2025 Quadrennial Defense Review calls “whole-of-society defense resilience” — a recognition that Taiwan’s survival depends not only on sinking ships but on feeding people while ships are being sunk.
The 2025 QDR, released under President Lai Ching-te, organises defence around “defensive posture, layered deterrence.” The layering is the key innovation. Taiwan’s defence is no longer conceived as a single threshold — can the PLA land troops? — but as a continuum of escalating costs imposed at every stage: grey-zone harassment, quarantine, blockade, air campaign, amphibious assault. Asymmetric firepower operates across all five stages. Mines laid in shipping lanes complicate a quarantine. Anti-ship cruise missiles threaten a blockade cordon. Mobile air-defence systems raise the price of air superiority. Coastal artillery and drone swarms turn beaches into abattoirs.
None of these capabilities “win” a war against the PLA. They are not designed to. They are designed to make every escalation ladder so expensive to climb that Beijing’s war planners cannot present Xi Jinping with a scenario where costs remain contained.
The actuarial logic is precise. A PLA blockade plan is an underwritten risk portfolio — it assumes certain loss rates for naval vessels, a certain timeline for Taiwanese capitulation, a certain probability of American intervention. Taiwan’s asymmetric systems distort every variable in that portfolio simultaneously. When the expected loss of surface combatants jumps from “acceptable” to “politically catastrophic,” when the timeline for capitulation stretches from weeks to months, when the probability of US intervention rises because the conflict has visibly escalated beyond a grey-zone action — the premium becomes uninsurable.
Where the Blockader Bleeds
The deepest irony of the “firepower is irrelevant” thesis is that a blockade creates the ideal conditions for asymmetric attack. A blockading fleet must do several things that conventional naval doctrine considers suicidal when facing a missile-armed adversary: it must maintain fixed patrol stations, operate within known sea lanes, and sustain logistics chains that are themselves vulnerable to interdiction.
Taiwan’s submarine force — small, ageing, but augmented by the first indigenous submarine launched in 2023 — exploits this exposure. A diesel-electric submarine operating in the shallow, acoustically cluttered waters of the Taiwan Strait is fiendishly difficult to detect. It does not need to sink a carrier. It needs to sink one tanker resupplying the blockade fleet, or one amphibious transport positioned for an escalation that Beijing swore was not coming. The “phantom drift” effect of even two or three submarines operating in the strait forces the PLA to devote disproportionate anti-submarine resources to patrol areas, thinning the cordon elsewhere.
Drones compound the problem. Taiwan’s military has invested heavily in unmanned systems — a shift the 2025 QDR explicitly prioritises alongside electronic warfare and cyber capabilities. Drone swarms launched from dispersed sites along Taiwan’s western coast can saturate a blockade fleet’s air defences at a fraction of the cost of manned aircraft. Each drone costs less than the missile used to shoot it down. Scale that exchange ratio across hundreds of engagements and the blockading fleet faces a war of economic attrition it cannot win.
Yet Taiwan’s asymmetric pivot remains incomplete, hamstrung by institutional inertia. The island’s defence establishment continues to pour resources into legacy platforms — F-16 fighters, large surface combatants — that serve as what one observer called “ritual objects preserving institutional face” vis-à-vis both Washington and Beijing. The tension is structural. Taiwan’s military bureaucracy was built around conventional force-on-force deterrence. Reorienting it toward distributed, expendable systems requires not just new procurement but a cultural revolution within the officer corps. Koo’s early tenure has featured rapid, visible reforms — eliminating outdated traditions, enforcing civilian oversight — but the deeper transformation will take a decade Taiwan may not have.
The Silicon Shield and the Caloric Floor
Taiwan’s defence cannot be understood in purely military terms. TSMC’s dominance of advanced semiconductor fabrication — producing over 90% of the world’s most sophisticated chips — creates what analysts at the Global Taiwan Institute have called a “silicon dagger” pointed at the throat of the global economy. A Chinese blockade that disrupts TSMC’s operations does not merely threaten Taiwan. It threatens Apple’s supply chain, Nvidia’s data centre buildout, and the Pentagon’s access to the chips that guide its own precision munitions.
This interdependence is deliberate. Taiwan has weaponised its semiconductor exports as a strategic instrument, ensuring that the economic consequences of a blockade fall heaviest not on Taipei but on Beijing’s own trading partners — and on China itself, which depends on Taiwanese chips for its AI ambitions and advanced manufacturing. The semiconductor leverage does not prevent a blockade. It ensures a blockade triggers a global economic crisis that makes sustained Chinese coercion politically unsustainable.
The effect on Japan alone could be decisive. Japan’s economy depends on sea lanes through the Taiwan Strait for energy imports and component shipments. A blockade that raises shipping insurance rates and disrupts trade flows through the strait threatens Japan’s industrial base directly. Tokyo’s anxiety about its sea lines of communication creates a structural incentive for Japanese intervention — or at minimum, Japanese logistical support for an American response — that Beijing cannot easily neutralise.
But the caloric floor remains Taiwan’s most urgent vulnerability. Semiconductor leverage buys time and allies. It does not feed 23 million people. Taiwan’s civil defence preparations — expanded reserve forces, stockpiling programs, the Whole-of-Society Defence Resilience Committee — represent a race against the blockade clock. The island needs sufficient reserves of food, fuel, and medical supplies to outlast a blockade long enough for international pressure, economic disruption, and military costs to force Beijing to relent. Current estimates suggest Taiwan could sustain basic functions for weeks under a tight blockade, not months. Closing that gap is as critical as buying missiles — and receives far less attention.
Three Levers, Three Costs
Taiwan’s strategic position hinges on three intervention points, each carrying a distinct price.
First, accelerate the asymmetric transition and abandon legacy platforms. Taiwan’s defence ministry should redirect procurement from F-16 upgrades and large surface combatants toward mines, mobile anti-ship missiles, drones, and electronic warfare systems. The cost: institutional revolt within the officer corps, reduced interoperability with US forces built around platform-centric warfare, and the symbolic humiliation of admitting that Taiwan cannot fight a conventional air or naval war. The gain: a defence posture that Beijing’s war planners cannot model with confidence, which is the definition of deterrence.
Second, build the caloric reserve. Taiwan’s cabinet should mandate a 180-day strategic food and energy reserve, funded by reallocating a portion of the defence budget and levying a resilience surcharge on energy imports. The cost: fiscal strain, public resistance to rationing-adjacent policies in peacetime, and the political risk of appearing to prepare for a war that most Taiwanese would prefer not to contemplate. The gain: transforming the blockade from a strategy that wins in weeks to one that must be sustained for half a year — a timeline that makes international intervention overwhelmingly likely.
Third, deepen semiconductor interdependence rather than diversify it. The conventional wisdom urges Taiwan to hedge by dispersing TSMC fabrication to Arizona, Japan, and Germany. Taipei should resist this impulse — or at least slow-walk it. Every fab built outside Taiwan weakens the silicon shield that makes a blockade globally catastrophic. The cost: dependence on a single point of failure, vulnerability to seismic or industrial disruption, and tension with Washington’s reshoring agenda. The gain: preserving the one strategic asset that guarantees the world cannot afford to let Taiwan fall.
The most likely trajectory combines elements of all three, executed too slowly. Taiwan will buy more missiles and drones while clinging to prestige platforms. It will expand reserves without reaching the six-month threshold. It will build fabs abroad while maintaining enough domestic capacity to remain strategically relevant. This muddled path is not irrational. It reflects the democratic reality of a society that lives under existential threat but refuses — with admirable sanity — to organise its entire existence around preparing for war.
Questions Worth Answering
Q: Can China blockade Taiwan without triggering a war with the United States? A: A grey-zone quarantine using coast guard vessels and maritime militia could avoid the legal threshold of armed conflict, but Taiwan’s asymmetric weapons exist precisely to force escalation beyond that threshold. The moment shots are fired, US treaty ambiguity resolves quickly under political pressure.
Q: How long could Taiwan hold out under a full naval blockade? A: Current estimates suggest weeks, not months. Taiwan imports roughly 70% of its food and nearly all its energy. Strategic reserves are growing but remain insufficient for a sustained blockade lasting beyond 30–60 days without severe rationing.
Q: Why does Taiwan still buy fighter jets and warships if asymmetric warfare is the strategy? A: Institutional inertia, officer corps culture, and the symbolic politics of appearing to field a “real” military. Legacy platforms also maintain interoperability with US forces, which matters if American intervention materialises. The tension between these priorities and asymmetric effectiveness remains Taiwan’s central defence dilemma.
Q: Would destroying TSMC facilities deter China from invading? A: The “scorched silicon” option — rigging fabs for demolition — is discussed but never officially confirmed. Its deterrent value depends on Beijing believing Taiwan would follow through, and on TSMC’s dominance persisting. As fabrication diversifies globally, this leverage erodes.
The Porcupine’s Wager
Taiwan’s asymmetric strategy is not an answer to the blockade scenario. It is a refusal to let the blockade scenario exist in isolation. Every mine in the strait, every missile launcher hidden in a hillside tunnel, every drone swarm programmed to converge on a patrol vessel — these are not weapons aimed at winning a war. They are costs imposed on the first rung of an escalation ladder that Beijing wants desperately to climb one step at a time.
The blockade’s seductive logic assumes a conflict that stays contained: economic pressure without military engagement, coercion without casualties, victory without war. Taiwan’s arsenal ensures that no Chinese planner can promise that outcome. The porcupine’s quills do not prevent the predator from attacking. They ensure the predator bleeds from the first bite — and must decide, with quills embedded in its jaw, whether the meal is worth the pain still to come.
That wager — on pain, on time, on the world’s inability to look away — is Taiwan’s strategy. It is not elegant. It may not be sufficient. But the alternative is a defence built for a war that ended twenty years ago, and a surrender dressed up as deterrence.
Sources & Further Reading
The analysis in this article draws on research and reporting from:
- Porcupine or Honey Badger: The Overall Defense Concept and Asymmetry in Taiwan’s Defense Strategy — foundational analysis of Taiwan’s ODC and its operational structure
- Can China Blockade Taiwan? — CSIS interactive assessment of PLA blockade capabilities and doctrine
- Can China Quarantine Taiwan? — CSIS analysis distinguishing quarantine from blockade scenarios
- TSMC: Taiwan’s Silicon Dagger — Global Taiwan Institute assessment of semiconductor strategic leverage
- Taiwan’s Weaponization of Semiconductor Exports — The Diplomat’s reporting on chip export controls as strategic tool
- Geopolitics of Technology in Taiwan — analysis of technology’s role in Taiwan’s defence posture
- On Day One: An Economic Contingency Plan for a Taiwan Crisis — Hoover Institution study on economic impacts of a Taiwan contingency
- Coercive Annexation of Taiwan — Baker Institute assessment of global consequences
- Weaponisation of Trade: The Indian Ocean Dilemma — Maritime Research Foundation analysis of trade route weaponisation
