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The Ukraine Lesson Taiwan Keeps Missing

It’s Not the Drones—It’s Everything Around Them

David Petraeus and Clara Kaluderovic

A Taiwanese soldier operating a drone during a military exercise in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, January 2026 Ann Wang / Reuters

DAVID PETRAEUS served as Director of the CIA, Commander of Coalition Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Commander of the U.S. Central Command. He is now Chairman of the KKR Global Institute, a Partner at KKR, and the Kissinger Fellow at Yale’s Jackson School.

CLARA KALUDEROVIC is Co-Founder and CEO of Mental Help Global (MHG), an AI nonprofit working in Ukraine, and Co-Founder of ex2, a nonprofit that develops AI applications for defense and humanitarian operations. She is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

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Article link: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/ukraine-lesson-taiwan-keeps-missing https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/ukraine-lesson-taiwan-keeps-missing

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That experience—and Ukraine’s similar experiences with aerial and ground drones of various types, ranges, and capabilities—illustrates the most profound lesson of the war: that an overall architecture that links sensors with analysts, leaders, and shooters can enable remotely operated surveillance and weapons systems to work at scale. To build this architecture, Ukraine turned command and control into a software problem. Ukrainian software engineers and technologists, and the foreign volunteers supporting them, produced the Delta system, their own battle-management system, rather than purchasing one from elsewhere. Now run by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, the Delta system gathers data from sensors on the ground, at sea, and in the air and then distributes the resulting high-fidelity picture to Ukrainian military units. It is the connective tissue that allows a mass of cheap systems to be directed against a smaller and far costlier array of traditional weapons.

Ukraine also overcame enormous manpower and economic disadvantages by adapting its defenses. When Russia started using relatively inexpensive Shahed drones against it, Ukraine knew it could not defend itself with costly missile interceptors. American-made Patriot interceptors, for instance, cost several million dollars; Shaheds cost less than $50,000. Ukraine reversed this ratio by developing interceptor drones that cost only a few thousand dollars apiece. The Shaheds thus went from being relatively cheap to being relatively expensive.

The particular figures matter less than the principle they illustrate: that the relative cost of each engagement is itself a strategic variable, and it may be turned to the defender’s advantage by invention and production rather than by purchase. One of Ukraine’s greatest advantages in its war with Russia has been the speed of its adaptation, which has been enabled by embedding engineers with the units they support and equip. Ukrainian manufacturers, meanwhile, have demonstrated extraordinary flexibility, often making software changes to systems every week or two and hardware changes every three or four weeks. (This year, Ukraine is expected to produce a staggering seven million missiles and drones.) The result is that improved designs are delivered to the field well before the enemy can adjust. Ukraine, in other words, has compressed into weeks a cycle that takes years in traditional procurement processes.

THE PROCUREMENT REFLEX

Taiwan, by contrast, has treated its defense as something to be supplied rather than constructed. For more than three decades—going back at least to its purchase of F-16 fighters in 1992—it has invested in traditional manned platforms that are guided by someone else’s military doctrine. This instinct is natural enough; such systems have anchored every modern force, and the United States, Taiwan’s guarantor and weapons provider for decades, has built its own forces around them. But this has left Taipei with an establishment that knows how to buy things and is fluent in U.S. doctrines, but that does not know how to develop systems and is unable to articulate its own beliefs about strategy.

The consequences are visible throughout Taiwan’s force, which still prioritizes the acquisition of expensive manned platforms. The same pared-down special budget that eliminated domestic drone production, for instance, preserved billions of dollars for purchases of U.S. weapons systems. Taiwan’s military has also not yet settled on a new doctrine for defense and deterrence that recognizes the contributions that unmanned systems could make. This has enormous downstream effects since the military’s organizational structures (such as a dedicated unmanned-systems service), training, leader education, procurement, personnel policies, and facilities won’t be updated to effectively field unmanned systems—or to train forces in their employment.

Ukraine overcame manpower and economic disadvantages by adapting its defenses.

Taiwan’s engineers, among the most capable in the world, also seem to be on the sidelines. The modern force must be able to contest the entire electromagnetic spectrum—from radio waves to infrared light—by building electronic-warfare capabilities, such as jamming and counterdrone defenses, while also preserving one’s own data links. But there are no signs that Taiwan’s engineers have been enlisted to confront this challenge. In Ukraine, Sky Fortress and the Delta system alike began as volunteer engineering projects that the military then adopted. Taiwan has produced no counterpart—no comparable channel through which its world-class commercial engineers contribute to defense solutions—and its drone manufacturers complain publicly that they don’t see clear demand from the government. If Taipei signaled that it understood the requirements of contemporary warfare, it would catalyze crucial changes in Taiwan’s formidable industrial base. Instead, at the very moment China is producing drones by the millions, Taiwan’s legislature withdrew the funding on which any serious scaling depends. Manufacturers cannot build mass for a customer that has not committed to buying their products, and foreign partners will take their collaboration only to markets that can demonstrate real demand.

Geography makes these deficiencies particularly worrisome. As an island, Taiwan is overly dependent on maritime imports that can be disrupted or blocked once fighting begins. Whatever Taiwan needs to have in a crisis, it must possess before the crisis begins. The island imports its energy and, at times, has held only weeks of reserves. It has also already seen maritime “accidents” sever the Internet cables that bind it to the world. Taiwan, in other words, cannot assume the luxury of choosing the war for which it prepares. Its readiness is a matter of organization and capacity, not merely of procurement.

TRANSLATION, NOT IMITATION

The lessons of Ukraine cannot, of course, be transferred to Taiwan unaltered. Ukraine contests terrain along a continuous front that is close to 1,000 miles long and has considerable depth to retreat, when needed. Taiwan, by contrast, would have to contest a strait and endure an aerial and missile campaign directed at a homeland that features no room for withdrawal. 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.

Of the lessons from Ukraine, neutralizing the aggressor’s navy is at once the most readily applicable and the most in need of adaptation for Taiwan. Indeed, this is Taiwan’s greatest opportunity: a mass of distributed, expendable, unmanned maritime systems, on the surface and beneath it, cued by aerial drones overhead, that could be capable of denying an invasion fleet the freedom to operate. To be sure, the waters of the strait are not those of the Black Sea. Taiwan’s application would demand designs that are suited to a harsher sea and a challenging coastline, as well as the persistent surveillance required to direct such a force and production at a scale and price that would allow Taiwan to absorb considerable attrition.

Taiwan still has time to build the architecture that will deter Chinese aggression.

Taiwan also requires a counterpart to Ukraine’s Delta system, conceived and sustained by Taiwanese hands, rather than licensed from abroad, and trained on data drawn from Taiwan’s own circumstances rather than Ukraine’s. What must be reproduced is not a specific system but the manner of its making: the close and continuous collaboration of operators, engineers, and analysts, as well as granting authority to those nearest the problem to constantly refine the solutions.

Taiwan’s potential adversary has drones, the largest conventional missile force in existence, and the world’s largest manufacturing capacity. For that reason, Taipei cannot rely on a modest stock of scarce and costly interceptors—although it will need substantial numbers of those for the missile threat. It must also field defenses that are affordable, layered, resilient, and abundant, and it must manufacture and accumulate them well in advance of any crisis. Such defenses would look much like Ukraine’s: dense networks of passive sensors to detect and track incoming systems; electronic warfare to jam and confuse them; interceptor drones of all types, produced locally and in volume, to destroy them; and the training pipelines and doctrine, continually updated, to knit these layers together.

Ukraine’s tempo of adaptation is the result of constant contact with a living and evolving enemy. Taiwan, rightly focused on deterrence, has no such instructor and cannot conjure one. What it can do is approximate the conditions—through exercises rigorous and unscripted enough to expose real issues, through the placement of its engineers with its operators rather than apart from them, and through the disciplined study of the Ukrainian experience.

Taiwan still has time to build the architecture that will deter Chinese aggression. It likely does not, however, have the time to purchase its way to safety, especially given the pace of deliveries from its major suppliers. (Only in April did Taipei receive the last of the 108 U.S. M1 tanks it ordered back in 2019.) The choice before Taipei, therefore—and, to a considerable degree, before those countries that have an interest in Taiwan’s ability to defend itself—is whether to persist in acquiring modest numbers of expensive but increasingly vulnerable manned platforms or to undertake the harder work of building expendable mass at home and the architecture to enable it. Other countries may assist in that task, but they cannot perform it. The deterrence posture of Taiwan is, in the end, Taiwan’s to sustain. And the principal lesson of the war in Ukraine is that a nation determined to survive must be willing to learn how to defend itself.

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