10 Ways the U.S. Can Strengthen Deterrence in the Taiwan Strait

Why Taiwan Matters

Taiwan is not merely a democratic partner in a strategically vital region — it is the single most important technology supplier upon which the American economy depends, a front line of the global contest between democratic governance and authoritarian control, and the model ally the United States has spent a decade demanding its partners become. In 2025, Taiwan exported $201 billion in goods to the United States, including 87 percent of America’s semiconductors and the AI servers built from them. Two Taiwanese companies, TSMC and UMC, together control nearly three-quarters of all semiconductor chips produced worldwide by contract manufacturers. TSMC has committed more than $165 billion to rebuilding American semiconductor manufacturing capacity — the largest such reshoring commitment in American history. No other ally has made a comparable investment in the durability of the American industrial base.¹

At the same time, Taiwan is doing what Washington has long demanded of its partners. Taiwan’s defense spending rose 14 percent in 2025, and President Lai Ching-te has committed to having Taiwan’s military investment reach 3.3 percent of gross domestic product in 2026 and 5 percent by 2030.² Taiwan is buying American weapons specifically designed for its threat environment — the HIMARS rocket system and Patriot, Harpoon, Javelin, and TOW missiles — and thereby implementing a porcupine strategy with American hardware. It stands daily against a U.S. peer adversary that claims it by sovereign right, absorbs relentless People’s Liberation Army (PLA) coercive pressure across air and maritime domains, and does so while maintaining a vibrant democracy through free and competitive elections. Trading Taiwan’s security away for trade concessions or diplomatic atmospherics with Beijing would not be dealmaking. It would be a strategic blunder of historic proportions, one that every ally from Tokyo to Warsaw would remember for a generation.

Washington’s Path to Deterring China on Taiwan

What follows are the 10 most important steps the United States should take to build interoperability between American and Taiwanese forces, strengthen Taiwan’s security posture, and improve the credibility of American deterrence in the Taiwan Strait.

1. The U.S. should accelerate FMS deliveries to Taiwan and propose $10-15 billion in annual sales.

Taiwan’s total Foreign Military Sales (FMS) backlog stood at approximately $31.72 billion as of March 2026,³ with outstanding deliveries exceeding $21 billion⁴ across F-16 Block 70 fighters, AGM-154C glide bombs, Patriot air defense systems, and MK-48 torpedoes.⁵ This backlog is not merely an administrative problem — it is a deterrence problem. Equipment approved but undelivered does not deter, train, or build the operational readiness Taiwan needs against an accelerating PLA modernization timeline. Given that the United States is the only country that sells substantial military equipment to Taiwan, it is unlikely that Taiwan can achieve the 5 percent defense spending or more that President Donald Trump desires without a consistent U.S. arms sales program.

The United States should set a formal target of delivering $10-15 billion in FMS annually to Taiwan, backed by a prioritization directive that elevates Taiwan deliveries when they conflict with other FMS customers. This requires two simultaneous actions: a presidential directive to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency establishing Taiwan FMS delivery as a formal priority and a sustained annual sales proposal of $10-15 billion covering the full spectrum of Taiwan’s asymmetric defense needs. The $14 billion package currently on the president’s desk — which reportedly includes advanced air defense systems, Patriot upgrades, and additional asymmetric capabilities — should be approved without further delay. Using Taiwan’s arms sales as a negotiating chip with Beijing, as was reportedly discussed by Trump and Xi during their June 2026 summit in Beijing, undermines the very deterrence framework the sales are designed to sustain.⁶

2. The U.S. should bolster TERA-mandated bilateral naval and air force exercises.

The Taiwan Enhanced Resilience Act (TERA), enacted as part of the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), mandated enhanced military training, exercises, and defense planning cooperation with Taiwan.⁷ It directed the Department of Defense to engage Taiwan in combined training, exercises, and planning activities.⁸ However, these mandates have been executed imperfectly, as exercises have remained modest in scale, limited in scenario complexity, and insufficiently integrated with the operational planning that actual conflict would require.

The United States should dramatically expand the scale, complexity, and geographic scope of bilateral naval and air force exercises with Taiwan. This means moving beyond port visits and simple maritime patrols to complex combined arms scenarios involving carrier strike group integration with Taiwan’s surface and submarine forces, joint air defense exercises against realistic ballistic missile and saturation drone attack scenarios, and maritime strike exercises that test the full operational integration of Taiwan’s Harpoon batteries with U.S. naval targeting architectures. These exercises should be conducted on a published schedule, as their regularity is itself a deterrence signal, and should include explicit scenario planning for the strait contingency that PLA exercises are rehearsing. Congress should direct the Department of Defense to report annually on exercise scope, complexity, and interoperability outcomes against specific measurable benchmarks, ensuring that TERA’s mandates translate into operational reality rather than diplomatic symbolism.

3. The U.S. should establish a persistent rotational U.S. Army Combat Arms Training Team in Taiwan.

The United States currently has no persistent rotational ground force present in Taiwan conducting sustained unit-level training with Taiwan’s army. The small number of U.S. military personnel engaged in training activities falls far short of what is required to build the operational proficiency that combined defense would demand. Taiwan’s army brigades and battalions need sustained engagement with U.S. military planning processes, specifically the Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP) and Mission Command doctrine that underpin U.S. military operational processes, that cannot be transmitted through occasional visits or attendance at U.S. schools.

The United States should establish a persistent, rotational U.S. Army combat arms training team in Taiwan, sized and configured to conduct sustained battalion-level training engagement with units across Taiwan’s ground forces.⁹ This team should be structured to work directly with Taiwan’s battalion and brigade commanders on MDMP, Mission Command, combined arms integration, and the tactical proficiency areas most relevant to a strait contingency, such as urban warfare, coastal defense, and anti-armor operations.¹⁰ The team should be large enough to simultaneously engage multiple units, allowing Taiwan’s army to build institutional proficiency rather than individual exposure. This does not require a permanent basing arrangement that triggers Chinese escalation. Rather, a rotational model, with teams cycling in and out on 180-day rotations, would provide a persistent presence while maintaining the legal and diplomatic framework of the Taiwan Relations Act, which Congress passed to govern U.S.-Taiwan relations following the break with Taiwan in 1979.

4. The U.S. should push joint ventures among Ukraine, the United States, and Taiwan for drone technology.

Ukraine has built the world’s most operationally validated unmanned-systems industry, producing between 4 and 7 million drones annually and developing combat-proven first-person-view (FPV) interceptors, electronic warfare systems, and unmanned surface vessels under the pressure of sustained high-intensity combat. Taiwan faces a threat environment that places an enormous premium on exactly the same capability set: mass, affordable, attributable unmanned systems that can contest PLA maritime and airspace approaches without requiring scarce manned platforms. The strategic logic of connecting Ukraine’s combat experience and development speed with Taiwan’s industrial capacity and America’s production base is compelling.

The United States should facilitate formal joint-venture arrangements among Ukrainian defense technology companies, U.S. defense firms, and Taiwan’s defense industrial base to codevelop and coproduce unmanned systems optimized for Taiwan’s operational environment. This includes FPV interceptor drones for counter-drone defense, unmanned surface vessels for maritime domain awareness and strait denial, and electronic warfare systems incorporating Ukraine’s battle-tested cognitive jamming architectures. Ukraine’s iterative procurement and adaptation model, which compresses concept-to-deployment timelines from years to weeks, should serve as the organizational template, with a dedicated U.S.-Ukraine-Taiwan technology transfer office established to manage intellectual property, export-control compliance, and coproduction agreements. The result would be a Taiwan drone industry that can produce the quantities modern warfare demands — at the cost points that sustained combat operations require.

5. The U.S. should codevelop and field low-cost air defense interceptors with Taiwan.

Taiwan’s air defense architecture faces the same fundamental challenge that Ukraine, Israel, and the United States have confronted: The cost-per-intercept of sophisticated missile defense systems is unsustainable against an adversary willing to use mass and cheap attack systems to attrite interceptor inventories. The PLA has invested heavily in exactly this approach: ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drone swarms that would rapidly exhaust Taiwan’s Patriot and Sky Bow interceptor stocks in the opening days of any contingency. There would also likely be a significant air assault, involving helicopters, against Taiwan.

The United States should establish a formal bilateral program to codevelop and field low-cost air defense interceptors specifically designed for Taiwan’s threat environment. Drawing on lessons from Ukraine’s interceptor drone programs, particularly the Bullet, Strila, and Octopus families that have achieved cost-per-intercept figures measured in thousands rather than millions of dollars, and from U.S. directed energy research programs, this effort should aim to field a layered low-cost intercept capability that can sustain high-volume engagements without exhausting Taiwan’s magazine depth.¹¹ The specific capability priorities are: affordable kinetic interceptors producible in sufficient volume to endure a siege-like threat environment; directed energy weapons for drone and cruise missile defense at a cost-per-shot approaching zero; and integrated fire control software that distributes intercept decisions across a dispersed, survivable network rather than concentrating them in vulnerable fixed sites.

6. The U.S. should approve the sale of E-2D Advanced Hawkeye aircraft to Taiwan.

Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense has submitted a formal request to Washington for the purchase of six E-2D Advanced Hawkeye airborne early warning and control aircraft to replace its aging fleet of five E-2Ks.¹² The United States has twice declined Taiwan’s requests for the E-2D, arguing most recently in 2025 that the system does not align with the concept of asymmetric combat forces.¹³ This decision deserves reconsideration.

The E-2D is not a platform optimized for offensive power projection; it is a surveillance and battle management asset that enables Taiwan to see the operational picture earlier, more completely, and more reliably than its current, aging E-2K fleet allows.¹⁴ Taiwan’s PLA threat has evolved dramatically since Washington first applied the asymmetric-forces argument: The PLA is now deploying next-generation stealth fighters whose signatures are beyond the detection capabilities of Taiwan’s existing E-2K radar systems, and PLA exercises are increasingly emphasizing simultaneous attacks from multiple vectors that require integrated airborne battle management to coordinate a defense. The E-2D’s AN/APY-9 radar provides the multitarget tracking, maritime surveillance, and joint battle management integration that Taiwan’s air and naval forces need to operate cohesively against a sophisticated simultaneous threat, both in steady state operations and at the initiation of combat. Japan and America are already E-2D operators, providing a natural interoperability bridge for multilateral exercises. The sale should be approved and prioritized within the FMS pipeline.

7. The U.S. should allow unconstrained visits of senior U.S. political and military officials to Taiwan.

Since 1979, American diplomatic and military engagement with Taiwan has operated under self-imposed constraints that have no basis in the Taiwan Relations Act and that Beijing has systematically leveraged to signal the manageable limits of American commitment. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) 2022 visit, and China’s massive military exercise response, demonstrated both that senior American visits are strategically significant and that the United States should not allow Chinese threats to determine the scope of its engagement with a democratic partner.

The United States should establish a formal policy of unconstrained senior official engagement with Taiwan, explicitly rejecting the informal protocols that have limited the seniority of visiting military and political officials. This means regular visits by senior cabinet officials and combatant commanders, as well as visits by the assistant secretaries and undersecretaries and 1-, 2-, and 3-star flag and general officers who manage American national security interests in the Pacific. These visits should be conducted openly and without the diplomatic hedging that signals to Beijing that American commitment has limits. Taiwan should reply reciprocally and arrange similar visits by Taiwan officials to the United States. The deterrence value of a visit by the secretary of defense to Taiwan lies not in the meeting’s substance but in the signal it conveys that the United States treats Taiwan as a partner whose security matters unconditionally. Each such visit should be coordinated with Taiwan’s government to maximize its operational benefit, whether through defense consultations, joint exercise observation, or capability demonstrations that build combined operational familiarity.¹⁵

8. The U.S. should motivate Japan and Australia to improve military-to-military relations with Taiwan and conduct multilateral exercises.

Japan and Australia are both moving rapidly toward greater defense spending, capability development, and regional security engagement, but neither has developed the formal military-to-military relationship with Taiwan that their geographic proximity and shared strategic interests would suggest.¹⁶ Japan, with its southwestern island chain lying directly adjacent to Taiwan’s northern approaches, has perhaps the most direct stake in Taiwan’s security of any U.S. ally. Australia’s commitments under AUKUS — the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States — as well as Canberra’s expanding defense partnership with Tokyo make it the natural third partner in a trilateral framework.

The United States should make encouraging Japanese and Australian military-to-military engagement with Taiwan an explicit priority in bilateral security consultations with both allies. This means pressing Tokyo and Canberra to establish regular defense dialogues with Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, exchange military personnel and information on PLA capabilities and tactics, and participate as observers, and ultimately as full participants, in U.S.-Taiwan bilateral exercises. A formal U.S.-Japan-Australia-Taiwan quadrilateral exercise framework, even if initially structured around maritime domain awareness and search-and-rescue scenarios that minimize Chinese escalation concerns, would establish the institutional muscle memory of combined operations that an actual contingency response would require. The goal is to ensure that if deterrence fails, Japan and Australia are not engaging with Taiwan’s military for the first time in a combat scenario.

9. The U.S. should establish a Maritime Transit Lane Framework for LNG in Northeast Asia.

Taiwan imports virtually all of its energy across Asian sea lanes that Chinese naval and coast guard forces could threaten or interrupt.¹⁷ A Chinese blockade or gray zone interdiction campaign targeting Taiwan’s energy imports would not require a single missile; it would simply require sustained maritime coercion that the existing legal and operational framework provides no clear mechanism to resist or remediate.

The United States, Japan, and Taiwan should develop a pre-negotiated Maritime Transit Lane framework for liquefied natural gas (LNG) and other critical energy imports in Northeast Asia, establishing agreed protocols for escort, surveillance, and diplomatic responses to Chinese interference with lawful commercial shipping. This framework should be negotiated in advance, not improvised during a crisis, and should designate specific transit corridors, establish combined maritime domain awareness coverage, pre-assign naval escort responsibilities among U.S., Japanese, and Taiwanese forces, and create a rapid diplomatic notification and response mechanism when Chinese forces interfere with commercial vessels. The model that should be used is Operation Earnest Will’s tanker escort framework used in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz in the late 1980s, adapted for the specific geography and threat environment of the Taiwan Strait’s eastern approaches and the broader Northeast Asian energy supply chain. This framework serves both deterrence and resilience functions: It signals that energy interdiction will be actively resisted, and it provides the operational architecture to make that signal credible.¹⁸

10. The U.S. should expand Taiwan’s IMET opportunities — especially Captains’ Career Courses and Navy Department Head School.

The foundation of operational interoperability is not hardware — it is people who know each other, trust each other, and share a conceptual vocabulary of military planning and execution. The International Military Education and Training (IMET) program has built exactly these networks with American partners across the world for seven decades. Taiwan’s participation has been inconsistent and insufficient relative to the operational integration the security relationship requires.¹⁹

The United States should maximize Taiwan’s IMET participation with explicit emphasis on mid-grade officer professional military education, specifically the U.S. Army Captain’s Career Courses and U.S. Navy Department Head School. These are the courses that shape how officers think about planning, command, and combined arms integration at the operational level where Taiwan’s forces and America’s forces would actually need to work together in a contingency.²⁰ A Taiwanese infantry captain who completed the U.S. Army Captain’s Career Course would understand MDMP, Mission Command, and combined arms maneuver in the same conceptual framework as his American counterpart. That shared understanding is worth more to combined operational effectiveness than almost any piece of equipment. The Navy Department Head School could similarly produce the Taiwanese surface warfare officers who would command the destroyers and frigates that the U.S. Navy would need to cooperate with in a contested maritime environment. Congress should direct the Department of Defense to set specific annual targets for Taiwan IMET participation at the O-3 to O-4 level (captain to major in the Army), track progress against those targets, and report the results to Congress annually.²¹

Conclusion

Taiwan has done what the United States has asked of its allies. It is spending, building, buying, and standing firm against an authoritarian adversary that claims it by sovereign right. The 10 priorities outlined above represent the operational complement to that political commitment, the concrete steps needed to transform Taiwan’s defense spending and equipment procurement into genuine combined-deterrence capability. None of them requires abandoning the One China Policy. All of them are executable within existing legal authorities, most within the Taiwan Relations Act framework that has governed this relationship for nearly 50 years. What they require is political will, the recognition that Taiwan’s security is not a bargaining chip but a strategic imperative, and the awareness that the credibility of American deterrence across the entire Indo-Pacific depends on how seriously Washington treats the partner that has taken its own defense most seriously.