March 27, 2026

Hellscape Taiwan: A Porcupine Defense in the Drone Age

By: Stacie Pettyjohn and Molly Campbell

This article was originally published in War on the Rocks

It is 2029. General Secretary Xi Jinping has given the order for the People’s Liberation Army to forcibly take Taiwan. Hundreds of Chinese warships begin to cross the Taiwan strait, supported by fighter jets and protected by an umbrella of electronic jamming. 80 kilometers from Taiwan’s coast, the first blow comes from below. Autonomous underwater vehicles lurking on the seabed detonate against the hull of troop transports, scattering formations and forcing destroyers to divert to antisubmarine warfare. Moments later, hundreds of cheap kamikaze drones, interspersed with decoys and antiship cruise missiles, approach the flotilla in waves from every azimuth, forcing air defense ships to fire their interceptors at everything, depleting their limited magazines with each salvo. Drone boats race in from all directions, some ramming hulls at the waterline, others launching rockets and loitering munitions at superstructures bristling with radars and other fragile electronics.

Rather than trying to build a military to rival that of the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan should turn itself into a prickly “porcupine”

By the time the surviving landing craft enter the mined shallows about 40 kilometers out, the carefully constructed invasion timetable is in ruins. Drone-laid minefields channel the ships into killing lanes where medium-range attack drones pick them off one by one. Loitering Taiwanese surface-to-air missiles patrol the skies above, driving Chinese aircraft into cautious standoff orbits far from the action below.

Read the full article in War on the Rocks.

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