It’s early days, but the signs are strong that Taiwan’s new government will insist on much more of a porcupine strategy for national defence than many officers in the country’s hidebound armed forces have been willing to accept.

If it succeeds, the island should be far more capable of fending off a conquest by China, and the armed forces will have to give up some of the traditional and glamorous but highly vulnerable weaponry that they are so fond of.

Much of the defence budget would shift to small and easily hidden systems that could threaten an invasion fleet, ground forces that have landed or aircraft supporting them. From China’s point of view, Taiwan would resemble a porcupine, covered in innumerable quills and hard to touch.

President Lai Ching-te of the Democratic Progressive Party took office in May. His

new defence minister, Wellington Koo, set out key aspects of military policy direction in an initial report to the legislature in June.

This included developing ‘asymmetric warfare’, a term used in Taiwan for the porcupine strategy. The focus would be on achieving ‘precision, mobility, lethality, dispersion, survivability and cost effectiveness,’ Koo said. A little over a week later, Koo doubled down, saying that the island’s strategy of deterrence would be based on ‘asymmetric’ thinking.

The porcupine strategy has become Taiwan’s most efficient means of defence because the island can no longer match China conventionally—say, by meeting high-performance fighters with comparable aircraft in comparable numbers. In those circumstances, it cannot apply its former strategy of fighting China’s forces across the breadth of the Taiwan Strait and wearing them down through attrition. Taiwan’s defence budget for 2024 is NT$606.8 billion ($27.6 billion), dwarfed by China’s official military spending of 1.6 trillion yuan ($327 billion), which doesn’t include all spending on the armed services.

The porcupine strategy would focus on a decisive battle in Taiwan’s littoral, where Chinese forces would be most easily detected and hit. Weapons and sensors would tend to be small, cheap, numerous and easily hidden; many would have only short range. For example, Chinese warships could be attacked using sea mines or with missiles mounted on trucks that were dispersed and concealed in Taiwan’s forests or cities. Much of the budget would shift away from buying expensive and conventional equipment, such as big armoured vehicles and fighters.

‘The Ukraine war has given us a big lesson that, even if you are the smaller one or the weaker one, you still have a chance to survive and resist successfully,’ says retired Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, who created the porcupine approach in what was called the Overall Defense Concept. It was adopted in 2017 but, Lee said in an interview with The Strategist, abandoned by the military two years later.

Lai, inclined towards Taiwanese independence, may have appointed Koo to shake things up. Formerly the head of Taiwan’s national security council, Koo is Taiwan’s first civilian minister of national defence in more than a decade. To Taiwan’s military, he is an outsider.

The armed forces have resisted adopting the porcupine strategy obviously because officers want to keep combat modes that they’re accustomed to and like big, flashy equipment that they can be proud of. Apart from fighters that could hardly be kept operational on airfields plastered by Chinese strike missiles, examples include four 10,000-ton destroyers that would be easily sunk if they stayed anywhere near the island in a war.

Historical legacy worsens the military’s rigid top-down culture and bureaucratic resistance to change: it was once part of the then authoritarian Nationalist Party (KMT), which imposed dictatorship on Taiwan from 1949 to 1987. Previous defence ministers have often been retired generals or admirals, who have tended to allocate funds and choose programs to suit the desires of the service they came from, regardless of the needs of national defence.

Taiwanese defence analysts close to the military have defended such choices. Lately they’ve tried to argue that the visible presence of big and expensive weaponry is good for public morale. They add that China gets a deterrent message from the United States when such equipment is sold to Taiwan. This dodges the problem that the stuff can be quickly obliterated in a war.

Perhaps the best argument for conventional defence equipment is that some of it, such as the F-16 fighter force, is needed to counter China’s grey zone warfare. During peacetime, warplanes help to ward off China’s frequent incursions into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone.

The United States has been pushing Taiwan to adopt a porcupine strategy and has refused to supply weapons that don’t suit one. For example, insiders say, in 2022 it rejected a Taiwanese request for Sikorsky MH-60R anti-submarine helicopters, which would be easily shot down.

But the United States has approved supply of two kinds of loitering munitions (one-way drones) to Taiwan: Switchblade 300s and Altius 600M-Vs. Inexpensive and launched by small groups of soldiers who would be hard to detect, those are the sorts of weapons that would make sharp quills on the porcupine.