Petraeus: Taiwan's Ukraine Problem Isn't Procurement

In a Foreign Affairs piece published July 8th titled "The Ukraine Lesson Taiwan Keeps Missing," David Petraeus and Clara Kaluderovic argue that Taiwan must replicate Ukraine's domestic innovation ecosystem in order to truly deter Chinese aggression. Until it can build and sustain its own layered defense architecture, Taiwan will remain dependent on imported, expensive weapons systems — not to mention energy. This dependency, the authors contend, is Taiwan's greatest weakness.

While Ukraine's achievements are admired in Taiwan, that admiration has not yet produced the enormous, fundamental changes that enabled Ukraine's success.

The Biggest Lesson from Ukraine

The most critical takeaway Taiwan needs from Ukraine is that effective defense requires not only aerial and ground drones of all types, but also an overarching architecture that links sensors, engineers, leaders, and shooters. That integration is what enables these weapons systems to function at scale. The danger, Petraeus and Kaluderovic warn, is that Taiwan appears to be defaulting to procurement. "There is a danger," they write, "that military strategists will look at the battlefield in Ukraine and see little more than a catalog of weapons to buy."

In other words, Taiwan needs drones like Ukraine's — but it also needs the architecture. Ukraine's Delta battlefield management system is precisely that kind of integrating layer. Taiwan needs its own equivalent.

The Geographic Problem

As an island, Taiwan is entirely dependent on maritime imports. Once a conflict begins, what it has is all it will have. A defense establishment that buys equipment but "does not know how to develop systems and is unable to articulate its own beliefs about strategy" is one without a clear path to island defense.

The task before Taipei is therefore not imitation but translation: the recasting of Ukrainian innovation for a theater more maritime and more exposed to the air.

What Should Taiwan Do?

Petraeus and Kaluderovic stop short of offering concrete prescriptions for Taiwan's defense establishment. But they conclude that there is still time to build an architecture capable of deterring Chinese aggression — while stressing there is no time to simply procure its way to safety.

Broader Themes for the Drone Industry

The key concepts repeatedly surfacing in discussions about the future of warfare — particularly around drones — are architecture, doctrine, organizational adaptation, and command structure. Petraeus himself, writing in The Hill in late April, argued that the Pentagon's $54.6 billion investment in the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group deserves applause, but risks going to waste without the right doctrine, organizational training pipelines, and continuous adaptation.

Taking this further: drones are increasingly viewed less as the focal point of modern warfare and more as the lethal end product of a broader human-technology stack. The system that supports, adapts, connects, and commands drones is the crucial factor in modern layered defense. Ukraine internalized this lesson years ago. Taiwan's defense establishment — and indeed those of any allied nation — needs to understand and operationalize this reality.

Analysts will also ask how applicable Ukraine's architecture truly is to an island that must defend against the world's largest missile stockpile with no strategic depth and no room to retreat. How different should Taiwan's architecture look from Ukraine's? Will the divergence lie in hardware, software, or somewhere in between? Petraeus and Kaluderovic are confident the architecture must be replicated — but they deliberately stop short of specifying to what degree.

Originally published on Small Wars Journal by Arizona State University.

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