Taiwan Focuses on Societal Resilience and U.S. Cooperation in New Defense Review
By:
Executive Summary:
- Taiwan’s 2025 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) prioritizes enhancing all-of-society resilience and emphasizes U.S.-Taiwan military cooperation.
- The document represents a significant improvement over its predecessor in content and clarity but suffers from being a document without consensus: Published by the Ministry of National Defense, the QDR does not reflect the views of other government agencies, limiting its ability to tackle the challenges it lays out.
- The new concept of operations (CONOP) detailed in the QDR has three new focuses: gradually “attriting” enemy forces as they encounter each defensive layer; a renewed focus on post-“beachhead operations,” referring to continued resistance after the PLA has gained further ground; and increasing the effectiveness of multi-domain operations buttressed by increased readiness.
- Amid some progress, issues remain for equipment acquisition, logistics requirements, and force retention and morale.
Taiwan’s 2025 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), published as usual within the first 10 months of the new President’s term, reflects both President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) and the new Minister of National Defense Wellington Koo Li-hsiung’s (顧立雄) unique approach to national defense (Ministry of National Defense, March 18). Taiwan’s QDRs generally do not reflect institutional consensus and, as publications at the Ministry of National Defense (MND) level, do not have the authority of a national security strategy. Nevertheless, they still provide insight into Taiwan’s declared defense policies and their inadequacies. [1]
Two major themes that emerge from the latest QDR are the high priority placed on enhancing all-of-society resilience—even if it requires authority higher than the MND’s—and the emphasis on U.S.-Taiwan military cooperation, encompassing strategic alignment on collective deterrence in the Indo-Pacific down to explicit mention of adapting U.S. standards for tactical combat casualty care. [2]
Changes Respond to PLA Escalation and Force Development
Posture changes in Taiwan’s 2025 QDR largely follow its force planning logic, which determines how to fight (打), equip (裝), organize (編), and train (訓) (ROC Navy Command, accessed April 14). [3] The main goal for Taiwan’s armed forces in an invasion scenario remains to “deter and delay” (嚇阻，延遲). That is, to deter the PLA from conducting an invasion by maintaining and signaling the capability to deny the success of such missions and, failing that, to delay its advances through all phases of territorial defense.
Taiwan’s National Defense Strategy has been consistent since 2021: “Resolute defense and multi-domain deterrence” (防衛固守、重層嚇阻) is still the top-level guidance. However, the National Military Strategy has evolved. The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) escalating gray zone coercion and changing operational dynamics due to the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) force development has pushed the MND to issue a new directive, perhaps more aptly described as a “concept of operations”—or CONOP—for Taiwan’s overall defense posture: ”multi-domain denial and resilient defense” (多域拒止、韌性防衛). In the top-level guidance, “multi-domain” refers to a layered defense approach in which invading forces are faced with multiple defense perimeters, while in the directive it refers instead to the collective employment of assets to form an effective kill-web across all layers of defenses.
The previous CONOP as of 2021 outlined a total of five phases for Taiwan’s defense, with a primary focus on decimating the bulk of the adversary’s combat power on the landing beach. The new CONOP differentiates itself with three new focuses: an emphasis on gradually “attriting” (削弱) enemy forces as they encounter each defensive layer/phase; a renewed focus on post-“beachhead operations” (濱海暨灘岸作戰) , solidifying the two additional phases that were originally implied but never elaborated, namely “defense in depth” (縱深防禦), the fighting phase after the PLA has broken out of the beachhead, and “protracted operations” (持久作戰), referring to continued resistance after the PLA has gained further ground; [4] and increasing the effectiveness of each layer through multi-domain operations buttressed by increased readiness. [5]
In practice, this means implementing distributed command and control, additional redundancy for logistics, and emission control. [6] It also entails increased societal resiliency, such as keeping critical infrastructure online to maximize the civilian population’s ability or support and sustain the fighting force. These changes recognize that while strategic and operational warning indicators may still be relatively stable, especially for a major operation like an amphibious assault, average tactical warnings will be significantly compressed given the PRC’s escalating kinetic gray zone operations and the possibility that its incursions could serve as cover for launching a full-scale invasion.
Societal Resilience Will Require Efforts Beyond the MND
The QDR counters the PRC’s gray zone operations by extending Taiwan’s efforts to the left of bang (that is, prior to the moment of engagement). Part of this focuses on strengthening public resolve. Instead of treating information and cyber as separate topics, the QDR now seems to recognize that Taiwan’s collective will to fight is the center of gravity for the PRC’s coercive tactics, something that the new whole-of society resilience effort must address.
The QDR directs efforts to focus on shaping advantageous legal narratives for consumption by both Taiwan’s public and the international community, instead of passively responding to Beijing’s disinformation and lawfare. Perhaps most importantly, it recognizes that the military’s current responses to gray zone operations—plane for plane, ship for ship—are actively eroding its combat power. This implies the need to conserve forces and for higher-ups to decide on trade-offs in force structure for Taiwan’s defense posture. The QDR’s whole-of-society blueprint makes progress toward mapping how Taiwan can reasonably withstand a blockade or quarantine scenario, including how to resupply the island under wartime conditions, though it does not address these scenarios explicitly. It highlights the need to focus on the continued provision of critical government services to the people and for stockpiling and accounting provisions for medical and emergency care.
However, the MND lacks the authority and, in many cases, the understanding necessary to tackle the challenges inherent in the document’s guidance. The QDR is further limited as a document that does not reflect opinions or understandings of other government agencies that cover critical resilience issues.
Issues Remain for Equipment, Logistics, and Force Retention
Equipment acquisition—the second step in Taiwan’s force development—is arguably the site of Taiwan’s most visible recent defense issues. The QDR acknowledges the challenge posed by delays in acquisition. Under the recommendation of the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation Office (CAPE) it has established the new Defense Innovation Task Force under the MND’s Department of Integrated Assessment. This organ is modeled after the DoD’s Defense Innovation Unit (but without the concurrent budgetary “other transaction authority”) and seeks commercial off-the-shelf solutions for Taiwan’s defense needs (Taiwan News, October 3, 2024). This is an initiative that has its origins in the Tsai administration but that is being accelerated under Minister Koo.
The new QDR also highlights the need for pre-positioned and dispersed logistics closer to frontline tactical positions. This eschews the 2021 QDR’s emphasis on bridging civilian logistics for military use and the 2023 National Defense Report’s focus on the operational readiness rate for exquisite major combat systems (MND, September 2023). The new QDR places significant emphasis on a unified civil-military defense mechanism, though it is still unclear if operational authorities will be delegated below the Executive Yuan for regional mobilization. Civil defenses and the mobilization of law enforcement and first responders for wartime have undergone significant organizational changes since 2021 and now constitute the lynchpin bridging efforts between regular military forces and civilian government to secure and maintain the provision of critical services to the public.
The QDR provides at least some principles on how to rectify issues of morale and retention for professional cadres. Directives, such as one that prioritizes officers returning from abroad for command positions so they can advance through the ranks, are clear efforts to correct decade-long issues. Recent pay increases favoring combat-coded personnel also indicate that the new administration is, at least in part, acting on the QDR’s diagnoses (Focus Taiwan, March 21; CTi News, March 25).
Conclusion
Taiwan’s 2025 QDR represents a significant improvement over its predecessor in content and clarity. However, it still suffers the fundamental limitation of being a document without consensus. Some parts espouse the importance of disaster mitigation and economic prosperity, while others urge the need to counter the existential threat the PRC increasingly poses. This limitation can only be remedied by top-level strategic guidance in the form of a national security strategy that addresses gaps such as how to prioritize gray zone, invasion, and blockade or quarantine scenarios; how to resupply the island and maintain sea lines of communication (SLOC); and how to communicate effectively to Taiwan’s public on what potential assistance they can expect from external actors.
The Taiwanese people need to understand what the government can do for them as well as what the government expects from them. Additionally, increased transparency and civilian oversight on critical issues from readiness to doctrine development and implementation are necessary to ensure that the guidance provided by QDR, a document without the force of law, can be followed through and understood at all levels of the armed forces.
Notes
[1] The author has written more on this topic elsewhere (See: Atlantic Council, March 25)
[2] All-of-society resilience refers to the ability of the entire country to withstand a wide spectrum of contingencies and still sustain the population and the military forces defending them. The examples of deeper cooperation with the United States are public communication efforts aimed at strengthening public confidence in U.S. security assistance for and cooperation with Taiwan as outlined in the Taiwan Relations Act, even as sensitive engagements such as participation in U.S. exercises cannot be highlighted (CTS, November 4, 2024).
[3] In other words, the military must first decide what sort of fight it is prepared to undertake. For instance, countering an amphibious fleet before it breaches Taiwan’s territorial waters, resisting a landing operation on the beach, or engaging in urban resilience. This determination, based on higher-level policy guidance, has implications for equipment acquisitions, organization for the proper employment of said equipment, and approaches to training.
[4] The two additional phases previously existed only in the military’s internal documents and were not given much attention. The primary effort to reach a decisive victory had been focused on the landing beach fight.
[5] Multi-domain operations include the space, electromagnetic spectrum, and cyberspace domains alongside the traditional sea, air, and land domains.
[6] Emission control refers to the controlled and selective use of electromagnetic, acoustic, or other emitters to minimize detection by enemy sensors and reduce interference among friendly systems.
