Rupert Hammond-Chambers On Taiwan: Lai provides leadership on defense aligning with Japan, US

Editorial in the Taipei Times
Monday, December 1, 2025

President William Lai’s historic announcement on Wednesday, Nov. 26, of a supplemental defense budget valued in excess of US$40 billion is a testament to the seriousness with which Taiwan is responding to the relentless expansionist ambitions of Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist Party and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Lai is responding to the threat posed to Taiwan sovereignty along with US President Donald Trump’s insistence that American partners in good standing must take on more responsibility for their own defense.

The supplemental defense budget will be broken into three main parts. The first and largest piece will be several Foreign Military Sales or FMS programs that are government-to-government transactions. FMS allows for both governments to negotiate directly on the value of procured equipment, such as previously procured HiMARS or NASAMs, while conferring sovereignty to Taiwan through the government-to-government nature of the transaction.

It equips Taiwan with important, modern, difference-making weapons while binding the two governments together in the training and sustainment of the equipment. FMS is the bedrock of America’s primary security relationships throughout the world.

Second, the budget will contain several Direct Commercial Sales or DCS programs. Where FMS is not a priority, DCS is utilized to expedite the delivery of equipment while placing increased pressure on price; it’s cheaper and faster.

This is the direction more defense transactions can go as Taiwan builds out its domestic defense industrial base and becomes further embedded in American and European supply chains.

This is possible because a new wave of relatively inexpensive unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) are not tied to onerous technology restrictions and can therefore be co-developed and co-produced inexpensively and at scale.

The third set of programs are intended for Taiwan’s domestic defense industrial base. This is a critical area of investment, as Taiwan must expand the ability to produce more of what it needs, domestically. Taiwan’s contract manufacturers are the best in the world and employing their manufacturing expertise to produce large quantities of needed items, particularly UAS, is crucial for Taiwan’s defense.

As Cathy Fang at the Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology (DSET) recently noted when discussing the utility of UAS, “quantity has its own quality”. It is imperative that Taiwan significantly expand its procurement of UAS capabilities; however, as the war in Ukraine demonstrates, the pace of innovation means you cannot over-procure, because the battlefield is changing so rapidly. Most UAS capabilities must be bought in tranches every two or three years, so the military and other agencies can constantly assess their needs and adjust procurement over time.

Indeed, Ukraine embeds decision making on procurement with some fighting units so they can provide input on new product development quickly.

Lai, in his recent column in The Washington Post, stated, “This landmark package will not only fund significant new arms acquisitions from the US, but also vastly enhance Taiwan’s asymmetric capabilities.” Since 2020, the US has narrowed its security assistance to Taiwan to include only so-called asymmetric capabilities. Please note, the term asymmetric is highly subjective, resulting in different interpretations. With Taiwan it mostly means procuring large quantities of munitions and mobile equipment to complicate the planning and execution of a D-Day-style attack on Taiwan’s main island. While this has the benefit of pushing off any PLA timeline regarding this scenario, it leaves Taiwan under-supported in dealing with quarantine, gray zone and blockade domains. It is no surprise that we now see China expanding its pressure on everyday challenges such as gray zone incursions. Taiwan seeks a balance between the D-Day domain and everyday challenges in the sky and on the sea.

US security assistance still needs to adjust to the reality of all of Taiwan’s challenges, not just one of them, and with the passage of the supplemental budget we should press for a less boundaried approach to Taiwan’s defense with equipment that can manage everyday challenges.

Additionally, it is essential that Taiwan’s political parties find a path forward to assess and pass the government’s regular annual budget. The defense budget, embedded in the regular government budget, is at the core of support for Taiwan’s military. A special supplemental budget is a useful mechanism to surge spending; however, it is the regular year-on-year defense budget that provides sustained resources for all the military’s needs.

To deny the military that certainty undermines the country’s defense with one step forward on the supplemental defense budget and two steps back on the regular defense budget. Both must pass in the coming several months for Taiwan’s security to be enhanced.

So what comes next? Several of the programs are already under review in the US system. When ready for contract finalization, the Trump administration will alert the US Congress, through a congressional notification or CN, of an impending sale such as the recent November 13 CN, which represented the first arms sales to Taiwan in Mr. Trump’s second term.

Given the sheer size of the programs captured in the supplemental budget, we can expect the Trump administration, over the next 6-12 months, to notify to the US Congress the largest gross value of arms sales to Taiwan since the switch in recognition in 1979.

This is an extraordinary response to the Chinese threat from the people of Taiwan and the partnered support they receive from the US.

The timing of Lai’s commitment is most welcome. The Chinese have chosen to pick an early fight with Japan’s new prime minister Sanae Takaichi when she noted in parliamentary question time, “If there are battleships and the use of force [in the Taiwan Strait], no matter how you think about it, there is a possibility that it becomes a survival-threatening situation [for Japan].”

China has rapidly escalated its rhetoric against Japan, threatened its leader with assassination, pursued some modest and frankly inconsequential economic actions while flooding the international media with claims of Japanese neo-militarism.

The latter assertion is simply preposterous given China’s recent militaristic behavior.

Takaichi’s comments are significant and worthy of consideration and support from the US and Taiwan. Like the United States, the Japanese have long pursued a policy of ambiguity over what military involvement in a Chinese attack on Taiwan would entail. As the threat from the Chinese has expanded, particularly under Xi, we are seeing increasing clarity from countries affected by this threat.

Strategic ambiguity is increasingly being replaced by strategic clarity, not all at once, but with each step. We have seen multilateral and bilateral declarations include the demand for “peace and security in the Taiwan Strait.” China naturally objects given its contention that this is a domestic matter, but it is the only belligerent threatening peace. We saw former US president Joe Biden on four separate occasions state the US would come to Taiwan’s defense. Yes, three instances were walked back by his staff, but the boundaries around acceptable clarity of global interest in Taiwan’s future is expanding and clarifying.

Taiwan’s supplemental defense budget is the correct response to China’s daily harassment of Taiwan. Takaichi’s statements along with her government’s consideration of deployment of Type 03 Chu-SAM missiles on Yonaguni Island, in response to constant PLA harassment of Japanese sovereignty, is the correct way to push back on Chinese threats and elevated tensions.

President Trump would do well to robustly support Japan when speaking to China. Conversely, in the United Kingdom constant violations of British sovereignty by Chinese intelligence services are met with appeasement as the government moves toward approving China’s mega-embassy designed for a single purpose: to undermine UK sovereignty. An utterly discredited approach where Mr. Starmer’s government self-censors sovereignty for marginal economic gain. The US spent two decades plus pursuing this approach, and it was a disaster; only China wins.

Trump’s insistence that partners and allies do more for their own defense is well-established. Lai’s recent commitments place Taiwan’s defense ambitions concurrently in line with the United States, Japan, Australia and other partner nations who are expanding their military capabilities to deter China’s destabilizing military modernization — the largest expansion of hostile combat power, by any country, since the end of World War II.

Trump, Lai and Takaichi should receive global support for their leadership.

https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2025/12/01/2003848100