October 05, 2026
Sea Drones a Taiwan Game Changer
This article was originally published in the Taipei Times.
China prefers to win without firing a shot in its bid to strangle Taiwan’s strategic autonomy. Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu (孫子) would have approved.
Its central tool at sea is the “cabbage strategy”: the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) layers fishing boats, maritime militia, coast guard cutters and warships around Taiwan’s contested waters in overlapping rings. Each layer normalizes daily coercion, narrows Taiwan’s freedom of movement and chips away at its maritime sovereignty — all while staying below the threshold of armed conflict. This is “gray zone” warfare at its most cost-effective — one of Beijing’s most promising paths to forcing acceptance of a new “status quo.”
The answer is not to match China ship for ship, but to field asymmetric, scalable tools — and to decide now that when they arrive, they serve the daily contest, not a war reserve.
Taiwan cannot answer this daily assault with crewed warships and cutters of its own. They are expensive, few and prone to escalation. The tool Taiwan is reaching for instead is the uncrewed surface vessel (USV): autonomous craft that can contest coercion at scale, leverage home-field advantage and operate at a far lower cost, all without putting sailors in harm’s way.
Read the full article in the Taipei Times.
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