It’s a typical day in Taiwan, and China is conducting yet another round of military drills. As Chinese warships and planes yet again aggressively circle around Taiwan, Taipei scrambles its military to defensive positions across the island. Among the most important is a cohort of mobile ground units carrying anti-ship missiles to deter Chinese ships from invading. But unknown to the Taiwanese, their movements are exposed, and their supposedly secretive hideouts are readily tracked by China’s intelligence. If this were an actual war, they would be seconds away from destruction.
This was an actual chain of events in May, just days after Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te was inaugurated on May 20. Beijing accuses Lai and his Democratic Progressive Party of pursuing independence for Taiwan—but it takes very little nowadays to provoke China into imposing another round of exercises around the island it claims as part of its territory.
On May 23, Taipei dispatched its military to confront China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the air and the sea just as before, though again no shot was fired. The Chinese exercises soon ended, and Taiwan’s ruling government went on a victory lap, claiming that its military had everything under control and people should rest assured.
But days later in June, an article appeared on WeChat, China’s largest social media platform. It was published by Beijing Lande Information Technology Co., a Beijing-based Chinese company that says it offers “research and consulting services” in the defense and security fields. The article, accessible publicly on WeChat, showcases the company’s ability to collect intelligence on Taiwan’s military.
The focus was a fleet of ground-based missile units of the Taiwanese military and their movements during the Chinese exercises in May. The Hai Feng Group, meaning “sea blade,” is among the most strategically important parts of Taiwan’s defenses. Operated by the Republic of China (ROC) Navy on land, Hai Feng fields Taiwan’s indigenous anti-ship missiles: the subsonic Hsiung Feng II (HF-II) and the supersonic HF-III, which could be the island’s last line of defense against a Chinese invasion making it to shore. They will also operate the Harpoon missiles made by the United States, though delivery has been chronically delayed.
The Chinese article offered the exact coordinates of 12 bases where Hai Feng units are stationed. Experts say fixed bases aren’t hard to find, and the Taiwanese military assumes that Beijing knows the locations, which is why mobile forces such as Hai Feng were designed—so they can spread across Taiwan and survive the initial onslaught in a war. At least in theory.
A typical Hai Feng squadron comprises at least three to four missile launchers, escorted by several support vehicles. The idea is that they are difficult for the Chinese to track down once mobile. They could waltz into random spots across Taiwan, raise their launchers, fire a salvo of anti-ship missiles at the Chinese fleets, and disperse before the PLA’s counterattack strike arrives—a military tactic known as “shoot and scoot.”
But alarmingly, the Chinese article exposed several exact locations across Taiwan where Hai Feng units were deployed in a shoot-ready posture on May 23. Pictures showed the units with their launchers raised and using camouflage nets. One squadron was located in the parking lot of a beachside resort hotel in Yilan in northwestern Taiwan, another in the parking lot of a marine aquarium near the port of Taichung, Taiwan’s second-largest city. In the southernmost tip of Taiwan, a squadron was in a parking lot inside Kenting National Park.
As it turned out, the Chinese company did not employ any secret leak or cutting-edge hack. These units were all spotted and revealed by Taiwanese themselves—some by journalists and others by civilians in the area who uploaded the photos to social media. Johnson Liu, a reporter for Taiwan’s United Daily News who published a story on the missiles, confirmed to me that this was not a “photo-op” and he and other reporters were tipped off by local sources who “saw the military convoy driving into the area.”
“The defense ministry never told us anything,” Liu said, “but I’ve seen the missile units using that parking lot in past exercises and immediately knew where they would be headed.” While the Taiwanese media or netizens didn’t go as far as specifying the exact location, all it took for the Chinese researchers was some web sleuthing using public resources like Google Maps to search for and pinpoint exact spots from available photos. The Chinese even calculated the routes and transit times involved.
As smartphones and social media uses proliferated in recent decades, open-source intelligence (OSINT) like this has become more frequent, as vividly demonstrated in the Russia-Ukraine war. In the face of Chinese missile power, Taiwan hasn’t adopted the level of security needed to keep its units safe.
A Dong Feng missile launched from China’s Fujian or Jiangxi province can hit anywhere in Taiwan in as little as five to seven minutes. Taiwan has some early warning sources from its massive PAVE PAWS and other air defense radars, which can project where a ballistic missile might land at least before the radars themselves are destroyed. But the fog of war and delays in communication between forces mean such a warning is unlikely to reach field units in time.
The Chinese company behind the WeChat article appears to be commercially operated. Its website boasts hundreds of research pieces on global military and security matters, a few of them related to Taiwan. It and its parent company were listed as having received some start-up incubator support from China’s Ministry of Science and Technology in 2022, but they are not otherwise owned by the Chinese government. While the company does not list its clients, experts I contacted assessed that its report on Taiwan’s military showcasing its capabilities to the public was likely an attempt to solicit more interest and contracts from the Chinese government or military.
This is not too different from today’s U.S. intelligence community and Defense Department, which are serviced by a vast array of civilian consulting firms and contractors, known as “intelligence outsourcing.” But as in the United States, such Chinese companies and their OSINT research represent only the lowest level of China’s overall intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, since it is certain that at the government and military level, China possesses vastly more powerful, expensive, and secretive tools.
For example, China’s Jilin-1 commercial remote sensing satellite system reportedly reached a fleet of some 138 satellites in 2023 and can take a fresh image from space of any given spot on Earth every 10 minutes. The PLA and Chinese intelligence have access to more powerful and secretive spy satellite fleets that include several hundred Yaogan and Gaofen satellites.
It might still be a stretch to say China today can track any part of Taiwan all the time. But the revelation is evidence that Chinese capabilities are rapidly evolving, aided by the Taiwanese inability to shield secrets in the age of social media. Taiwan’s military must operate with extra diligence and tactical flexibility, or it might see its most important defensive assets easily destroyed by China at the beginning of a war.
Chang Ching, a defense analyst at the Taipei-based Society for Strategic Studies and a retired ROC Navy captain, said the Hai Feng units’ movements that day appeared to be attempts at prepositioning themselves to firing positions but were done recklessly and without regard to operational security.
Experts also question why the missile units did not immediately relocate that day after their positions were clearly exposed by media and on social media. James Huang, a retired ROC Army lieutenant colonel and a columnist on defense matters, told me that while common sense and military doctrines dictate an immediate response, these units likely stayed in place as their field commanders were “assigned” those spots by the headquarters and did not possess the intuition or initiative to reposition their units to safety. Huang described it as typical of the heavily top-down, scripted command and control model of the Taiwanese military.
Taiwan military insiders such as Chang and Huang agree that Hai Feng units have more “standby” locations across Taiwan not yet revealed to the public and that what the Chinese article exposed was a fraction of the total forces. However, with each of these potential sites exposed and recorded, the more accurate the Chinese “targeting picture” becomes, the faster and easier the PLA can track their movements with satellites and other tools, and the grimmer the prospect of the survival of these Taiwanese units becomes when war comes.
Even Taiwan’s state-owned Central News Agency has frequently published or promoted news and photos of civilians spotting mobile missile units on the road to boost morale, sometimes even providing detailed routes and timing of movements. This lack of security awareness by the government and the military is foolish and suicidal, experts said.
“Taiwan is too small to hide anything. Citizens and even government personnel generally lack awareness regarding safeguarding sensitive information, which made the situation worse,” Chang said.
Mobile missile units are supposed to be among the most resilient and hard to track military pieces. U.S. pundits as well as the Pentagon have repeatedly pushed Taiwan to buy and field more Harpoon anti-ship missiles. The Taiwanese defense ministry’s 2021 Quadrennial Defense Review also listed anti-ship missiles as chief among several weapons thought to be “asymmetric,” meaning they are “stealthy, mobile, and hard to detect.”
But if these weapons are not operated intelligently, they might be just as if not more visible and vulnerable than so-called conventional weapons such as tanks and fighter jets, said Lyle Goldstein, an expert on the PLA and a professor at Brown University.
“A lot of people are premising Taiwan’s defense strategy on these supposedly asymmetric weapons, but they ignored Taiwan’s huge vulnerability in the age of long-range precision fires,” Goldstein said. He pointed out that besides missiles, China also fields a massive fleet of loitering munitions such as suicide drones, which could be used to swarm Taiwan in a war.
In Ukraine, Russia has been increasingly successful in locating and destroying Ukrainian mobile missile units such as the much-prized U.S.-provided HIMARS launchers, although Ukrainians operate them with extreme security and secrecy. Taiwan is also 17 times smaller than Ukraine, which makes it so much easier for Chinese intelligence to map out and track things.
There are plenty of signs that the current Taiwanese government and military leadership are unwilling or incapable of facing reality. In the weeks after the Chinese article was published, it received little attention in Taiwan and only a handful of media reports, which casually dismissed it as “propaganda.” Taiwan’s state media even quoted an “expert” affiliated with the defense ministry boasting that “the Chinese are scared by our missiles.”
This hubris, and the refusal to acknowledge China’s ever-rising power, is the prevailing attitude at the top of Taiwan’s defense ministry and national security leadership, according to a former senior staffer at Taiwan’s National Security Council under the previous government of President Tsai Ing-wen who requested anonymity.
“Everyone—including the Americans—only cares about the flashy weapons Taiwan bought and pretend the more we have, the safer we are. They couldn’t be more wrong,” the staffer said, commenting on the vulnerability of Taiwan’s mobile missile units. “No amount of weapons can fix deficiencies and incompetence at the tactical and operational levels, but hardly anyone cares about those reforms we actually need.”
“Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and any military unit that is already exposed to the enemy in peacetime will be destroyed in wartime,” the staffer said. “We will witness this in a war unless fundamental changes at leadership level happen and we start to treat war as it is and not what we wish it to be.”
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