Taiwan Is Defensible — But the Real Question Is What It Will Cost

Taiwan has not become harder to defend because drones, missiles, and sensors have transformed modern warfare. It has become harder to defend because "cheap deterrence" is no longer a viable option.

Washington is trapped in a kind of lazy thinking. One camp holds that Taiwan is already lost — that China is too close and the military balance has shifted too far to reverse. Another camp believes that low-cost drones and uncrewed surface vessels can solve the problems that aircraft carriers, air bases, and manned aircraft are increasingly ill-suited to handle.

Both camps dodge the more fundamental question: Taiwan can be made costly for an adversary to take, and China can be denied a quick victory — but the price of seriously defending Taiwan is one that almost no one in Washington has begun to reckon with honestly.

The Drone Age Cuts Both Ways

Admiral Samuel Paparo's "Hellscape" concept does capture something real about how modern warfare has evolved. If China attempts an amphibious landing, it must move troops, armor, fuel, and follow-on forces across the Taiwan Strait. That means ships sailing predictable routes, landing craft approaching narrow beaches, ports that must keep functioning, and communications that cannot go dark.

Drones make all of this more dangerous. Small UAVs can find targets; uncrewed surface vessels can threaten ships; loitering munitions can turn logistics lines into exposed liabilities; mines, mobile missiles, decoys, and cheap sensors compound the problem further. None of this guarantees Taiwan's survival, but it does mean a Chinese assault would no longer resemble a parade — it would look more like a gamble whose cost Beijing could not calculate in advance with precision.

China has also been watching these wars. It too has drones, large missile inventories, cyber tools, space assets, electronic warfare capabilities, and an industrial base capable of absorbing losses. The drone age does not simply "save" Taiwan; it makes the entire fight more lethal and less forgiving of error.

The War Would Not Stay Contained to Taiwan

What Washington least wants to acknowledge is the geographic reality. Taiwan is close to China and far from the United States — a fact that no amount of innovation can change.

Defending Taiwan would require the U.S. to operate inside a region China has spent decades designing to be deeply unfavorable to American forces. Ships would be exposed to threat; air bases in Japan and Guam would immediately become critical nodes; fuel depots, ports, maintenance hubs, and command networks would all be drawn into the conflict, even if no one in Washington wants to say so plainly.

Japan cannot remain on the sidelines in any Taiwan contingency. U.S. bases in Japan are central to any operational plan. That means Tokyo would face political and military choices almost from the moment hostilities began. The entire alliance architecture would function as the operating platform for American strategy — not merely as a diplomatic footnote.

In this context, casual talk of "resolve" is dangerous. Resolve is cheap before the fighting starts. It becomes expensive when runways are cratered, ships are struck, pilots are killed, and allies begin calculating what the next Chinese missile salvo would mean for their own cities.

Taiwan Can Survive — But Americans Will Bleed Too

Recent publicly available Taiwan war-game simulations do not conclude that defense is futile. The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Taiwan Strait war games found that a combined U.S., Taiwan, and Japanese force could defeat a conventional Chinese invasion in most scenarios and preserve Taiwan's independence — but at severe cost.

The rest of those findings are equally sobering. In the simulated scenarios, the United States and its allies lost dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of service members. Taiwan's economy was devastated. American global standing would take years to recover.

This is not an argument for surrender; it is an argument for clarity. A campaign might be won in the narrow military sense while leaving the United States strategically weaker. Great-power wars have a way of grinding carefully designed plans into cruder choices.

If the U.S. inflicts large-scale losses on Chinese forces, Beijing retains the option to escalate. China could strike bases beyond the immediate theater, use cyber attacks and economic pressure to fracture American alliances, or absorb losses that Washington assumes no rational actor would accept.

The Blockade Problem

Invasion is the analytically cleanest scenario — and also the least likely to unfold cleanly. China may well prefer more ambiguous instruments: a maritime blockade, a partial port closure, pressure on shipping, or a graduated campaign rather than a dramatic opening strike.

An armed assault hands Washington a clear trigger. A blockade forces the question: when is the United States willing to fire first? China would attempt to blur that question by using coast guard vessels, maritime militia, legal claims, and selective pressure on commercial shipping. The aim would be to impose pain on Taiwan while making American escalation look like a choice rather than a necessity.

Serious Strategy Requires an Honest Accounting

Taiwan has already become harder to coerce or conquer on its own territory and surrounding waters. The current priority should be building sustainable denial capacity: drones that can be rapidly replenished, concealed anti-ship missiles, mines to disrupt operations, air defenses to keep critical infrastructure functioning, and enough ammunition stocks to survive the opening days of a conflict.

Washington also needs to be more candid about its war aims. The goal should be denying Beijing a quick victory — not committing to an open-ended war for dominance in China's near seas. These are two very different tasks, requiring different force postures, different alliance diplomacy, and a different tolerance for risk.

Restraint is not indifference to Taiwan. It is a refusal to conflate vital interests with unlimited interests. Taiwan matters — to the people who live there, to Japan, to the balance of power in Asia, and to American credibility, even if that word has been stretched well past its limits.

Drones may help Taiwan impose severe costs on China during the first week of a conflict. They may make a landing bloodier, a blockade riskier, and a fait accompli harder to achieve. But they cannot change geography, eliminate escalation risks, make Japan invulnerable, put Guam beyond reach, or render American losses politically costless.

Taiwan's situation is not hopeless. But the real illusion is the belief that defending it can be made cheap enough to avoid the tragic calculus at the heart of this choice.

About the Author: Dr. Andrew Latham

Dr. Andrew Latham is Professor of International Relations and Political Theory at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Follow him on X: @aakatham.

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