Taiwan Wants Suicide Drones to Deter China

Taiwan is looking to buy U.S.-made loitering munitions—also known as suicide drones—which have become one of the signature weapons on the modern battlefield, from Nagorno-Karabakh to Ukraine, hovering over fighting for hours at a time before swooping in for the kill. 

Taiwan—which has faced near-daily Chinese military exercises for the past three years, including People’s Liberation Army fighter jets flooding the island’s air defense identification zone and virtually erasing the median line that sits across the Taiwan Strait—is said to covet both variants of the AeroVironment Switchblade drone, according to four people familiar with the situation. 

The Switchblade, which can fit in a backpack in its smallest form and also has a much larger variant that can be used to take out tanks and armored vehicles, costs about $50,000 per drone, according to the manufacturer. The U.S. Army has stopped buying the smaller variant, known as the Switchblade 300, but the new supplemental budget passed by Congress gives the Defense Department about $72 million to buy several hundred more of the larger variant, the Switchblade 600, and the service is expected to begin fielding the drones next year.

Taiwan’s interest in the U.S.-made drones is an increasing sign that Taipei is bowing to the U.S. push—which dates back to the Trump administration—to focus on buying munitions that would help deter or ward off a Chinese invasion of the island. 

“This is all part of the U.S. push for asymmetry,” said Ivan Kanapathy, a nonresident senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former National Security Council official during the Trump administration. “We were telling them, ‘You guys need to buy a lot more munitions.’”

Early loitering munitions date all the way back to the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, but they really came into fashion during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, when Israeli-made loitering munitions supported a lightning Azerbaijani ground offensive that overwhelmed a less technically savvy Armenian military that fought out in the open. 

The AeroVironment Switchblade is the U.S. version. Manufactured in California and Utah, the Switchblade is fired out of a tube and has been used extensively by the Ukrainian military. About 1,100 U.S.-made Switchblades have been sent to Ukraine since the early days of Russia’s full-scale invasion. The Kremlin has countered that with its production of the Lancet drone and supplemented it with Shahed drones from Iran that use satellite navigation instead of a radiation-seeker.

All of these variants have been effective on the battlefield and are now almost ubiquitous—although pocket-sized jammers used to disable them have become almost equally as ubiquitous. Their uses have been evolving, too. For years, China has fielded the so-called “Harpy,” an Israeli-made loitering munition that is designed to take out enemy radars. (The second generation of that weapon, known as the “Harop,” was Azerbaijan’s weapon of choice in the 2020 war.)

And over time, China’s advantage in the skies has only grown, as Chinese strategists have come to believe that the weapon can be effective in modern attrition warfare. Sky News recently reported that China now has tens of thousands of drone variants. The Taiwanese have about four drone types of their own. 

But Taiwanese officials increasingly believe that the U.S.-made suicide drones—which are only good for one shot—would be effective at plunking Chinese ships if they come across the Taiwan Strait or hitting Chinese tanks and vehicles if they come ashore, said the people familiar with Taiwan’s interest in the drones, who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about a pending military sale.

Taiwan has submitted a letter of request to the Defense Department for a drone that the Switchblade 300 would fit, although the people familiar with the request said AeroVironment was not specifically named. Taiwan has sent a second letter of request to the Pentagon for a larger drone variant, with competition between the Switchblade 600 and Anduril’s Altius-600, which can loiter over a target for four hours, longer than AeroVironment’s model.

A spokesperson from the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States, Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Washington, declined to comment, citing a practice of not talking about details of U.S. defense cooperation.

In an email, Lisa Lawrence, a Defense Department spokesperson, said the agency would not comment on proposed defense sales before they were notified to Congress. Anduril declined to comment, and AeroVironment did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

The Biden administration has started to make a dent in the $19 billion in backlogged military sales to Taiwan in the past several years, approving 13 congressional notifications for weapons sales since 2021. But the deals have been almost exclusively focused on items on the Pentagon’s integrated capabilities list, a register of cost-effective weapons that includes mostly munitions, and sustaining the weapons that they already have. 

Taiwan’s outgoing president, Tsai Ing-wen, has made it a requirement for the island to field more than 3,000 military drones, and some 50 Taiwanese research teams are competing for more than $300 million in government contracts. Much of that money is focused domestically.

That investment has already had an impact. Taiwanese companies have unveiled their own home-built loitering munitions, which can hit targets up to 93 miles away. Taiwan has also started a quasi-government agency that is meant to function like the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a defense technology incubator that claims at least partial credit for modern inventions such as GPS and the internet. 

Heino Klinck, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense, said Taiwan’s long-term goal is to build weapons that are easily expendable and could be produced on the island, not just buy fancy U.S.-made weapons. “The Taiwanese have to be selective in how they invest,” Klinck said. “You need to be able to contend with the new normal that the Chinese have established and are continuing to establish almost on a daily basis.”