U.S. presses Taiwan weapon buy

Focus on certain arms for effective defense against China

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is quietly pressing the Taiwanese government to order U.S.-made weapons that would help its small military repel a seaborne invasion by China rather than weapons designed for conventional set-piece warfare, current and former U.S. and Taiwanese officials say.

The U.S. campaign to shape Taiwan’s defenses has grown in urgency since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine ordered in late February by President Vladimir Putin. The war has convinced Washington and Taipei that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in the coming years is now a potential danger — and that a smaller military with the right weapons that has adopted a strategy of asymmetric warfare, in which it focuses on mobility and precision attacks, can beat back a larger foe.

U.S. officials are reexamining the capabilities of the Taiwanese military to determine whether it can fight off an invasion, as Ukrainian forces have been doing.

President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan is trying to orient the country’s military toward asymmetric warfare and has moved to buy a large number of mobile, lethal weapons that are difficult to target and counter.

But some Taiwanese defense officials are resistant. And U.S. officials have decided that certain weapons systems that the Taiwanese Defense Ministry has tried to order — the MH60R Seahawk helicopter made by Lockheed Martin, for example — are not suited for warfare against the Chinese military.

The U. S. officials have warned their Taiwanese counterparts that the State Department would reject such requests. They have also told U.S. weapons-makers to refrain from asking U.S. agencies to approve Taiwanese orders of certain arms

The push by the Biden administration has broadened and accelerated similar efforts by officials in the Trump and Obama administrations.

“I sense there has been a shift,” said Bonnie S. Glaser, a East Asia analyst at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. “It started before the invasion of Ukraine, but I think it has really, really solidified since then. There has been this wakeup call in the Pentagon to make sure Taiwan is serious, and we need to get serious, too.”

State Department and Pentagon officials have been involved in the discussions with the Taiwanese government. The Biden administration also sent a bipartisan delegation of five former senior national security officials to Taiwan in early March to talk to Tsai and other officials about the country’s defense strategy and weapons procurement, among other matters.

“Continuing to pursue systems that will not meaningfully contribute to an effective defense strategy is inconsistent with the evolving security threat that Taiwan faces,” a State Department representative said. “As such, the United States strongly supports Taiwan’s efforts to implement an asymmetric defense strategy.”

For decades, Communist-ruled China has vowed to bring Taiwan, a democratic island with de facto independence that is a U.S. partner, under its control. While there is no sign that war is imminent, President Xi Jinping of China has adopted a more aggressive foreign policy than his predecessors, and U.S. officials fear he might invade Taiwan to seal his legacy.

The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 obligates the U.S. government to provide equipment of a defensive nature to Taiwan. Every administration since then has maintained a policy of “strategic ambiguity” on the question of military intervention — meaning they have not explicitly said whether the U.S. military would defend Taiwan if China attacked.

On Thursday, Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng told parliament that the ministry had dropped a plan to buy the MH60R helicopters because they were too expensive.

In recent weeks, Taiwanese officials have expressed their own frustrations with the U.S. government and U.S. weapons makers, complaining of delivery delays and unfilled-orders. Tsai herself has sent messages to Washington, officials said.