Catarina Buchatskiy is a co-founder and the director of analytics at the Serpens Center for International Security. Mark Montgomery is a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral and senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
In May 2022, Ukrainian engineers converted a fishing boat into a drone. By early 2024, boats costing roughly $270,000 were sinking Russian warships worth $60 million to $70 million each. When Russia sent helicopters and jet fighters to hunt them, Ukraine armed the drones with missiles and shot down those aircraft. Each Russian challenge on the Black Sea since 2022 has driven Ukraine to create a countermeasure, a new technology or tactic.
Thanks to rapid innovation by its engineers and military, Ukraine has built the world’s most advanced unmanned navy. It has also developed extensive knowledge about adapting to the range of threats a military can face at sea. That experience points to a role for Ukraine that its partners have barely begun to use: helping other threatened democracies simulate and plan for the campaigns Russia’s partners are preparing.
Over the past year, researchers from the Serpens Center for International Security have asked operators and builders of Ukraine’s unmanned fleet how they would approach a different fight: the defense of Taiwan. War games shape how militaries plan, procure and deploy. These exercises are usually designed and executed by people who have never fought the kind of war Ukraine is fighting. That matters, because the instinct and intuition of Ukrainians give them a unique vantage point: They understand how they would adapt or conduct a naval campaign in almost any condition.
Taiwan confronts a different challenge from China’s People’s Liberation Army than Ukraine faces from Russia in the Black Sea. Several major war games suggest that China would seek to launch a rapid cross-strait invasion, relying on thousands of vessels, from large warships to small fishing boats, and hundreds of air-assault helicopters and even airborne paratroopers, all intended to establish an initial invasion force in Taiwan.
Adm. Samuel Paparo, head of U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, has described a U.S. contingency plan for defending Taiwan as creating a “hellscape” of layered maritime strikes. Taiwan would need thousands of unmanned vessels whose goal is to turn the strait into a chaotic kill zone that disrupts Chinese assault fleets for weeks, buying Taiwan and its allies crucial time to respond.
In examining this type of campaign, Ukrainian operators looked beyond high-interest warships to the ferries, cargo ships and floating piers an invasion force would depend on. They treated the strait’s rough seas and fog as cover, not obstacles. They assumed half of each attacking wave would need to be destroyed and planned accordingly.
They were equally quick to identify what would not work. Ukraine was able to keep building drones because its supply chains crossed an open E.U. border. For an island, maintaining a steady flow of supplies would be incredibly difficult. This shaped their defense planning: what industrial capacity would need to exist and what stockpiles would need to look like.
Our research estimates that a credible inventory of surface and undersea strike drones would exceed 1,000 boats. Depending on how many are destroyed before launch, Taiwan would need to procure as many as 5,000 unmanned vehicles. Taiwan’s current plans call for about 1,600 boats, and at today’s production pace that fleet would take several years to complete. Budgetary fights between Taiwan’s two leading political parties are largely centered on funding for drone production, and these disputes threaten to delay that timeline.
Ukraine’s operators kept returning to key arithmetic. How many boats would exist on the first day of a war? Where would they be stored, and how would they reach the water under constant surveillance? Ukraine’s coast has river deltas and estuaries in which to hide a launch. Taiwan’s western shore is densely built, heavily populated and watched around-the-clock. A few thousand six-meter boats need to be dispersed along the coast, maintained in hardened storage and launched using routines that satellites cannot predict.
Ukrainian warfighters can offer their operational expertise to anyone preparing for a fight at sea: Taiwan, the Baltic states, Japan’s southwestern islands, the Philippines and the U.S. Navy. As Moscow’s close partner in the war against Ukraine, Beijing is learning vast amounts from the battlefield and is likely running its own version of this exercise, studying the Black Sea from the defender’s side. The question is who learns faster.
The post Ukraine knows the secret to defending Taiwan appeared first on Washington Post.
