Taiwan’s Han Kuang drills demonstrate its quills are growing sharper

Excerpt

Taiwan concluded its annual Han Kuang military exercise on July 18, the 41st iteration and the most extensive in recent years. A review of the missions rehearsed, the hardware involved and the scope of the exercise demonstrates Taipei’s important but insufficient progress toward building defense capabilities essential to convincing Beijing that it should not launch military aggression against the free people of Taiwan.

Taiwan has accelerated efforts to modernize its military in recent years. This year’s joint, multidomain exercise expanded in length from five to 10 days, ran continuously and introduced additional realistic scenarios such as countering gray-zone coercion and fighting in urban areas. It also featured several critical U.S.-produced systems, including the M1A2T Abrams main battle tank, High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS), Patriot long-range air and missile defense system and man-portable Stinger surface-to-air missile.

While it has been alleged that delays in deliveries of these systems to Taiwan were the result of U.S. assistance to Ukraine, new systems have continued arriving in recent months, highlighting the progress made by the U.S. defense industrial base since 2022. In particular, Taiwan is now expected to receive more HIMARS, and on an accelerated timeline, than it did before the 2022 Russian invasion.

Still, the HIMARS participating in the exercise had arrived only around seven months earlier and began deployment just weeks prior. Similarly, the Abrams tanks reportedly arrived in December 2024. Several other important weapons systems, such as the Harpoon Coastal Defense System, have not been delivered in sufficient quantities. But as Washington works to improve its defense industrial base further, Taipei can take interim steps such as requesting advance training on U.S. systems that have yet to be fully delivered, as was done with maintenance training for the Abrams tank.

Fanny Chao is an intern at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Military and Political Power, where Ryan Brobst is the deputy director.