Sea drones a Taiwan game changer

China prefers to win without firing a shot in its bid to strangle Taiwan’s strategic autonomy. Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu (孫子) would have approved.

Its central tool at sea is the “cabbage strategy”: the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) layers fishing boats, maritime militia, coast guard cutters and warships around Taiwan’s contested waters in overlapping rings. Each layer normalizes daily coercion, narrows Taiwan’s freedom of movement and chips away at its maritime sovereignty — all while staying below the threshold of armed conflict. This is “gray zone” warfare at its most cost-effective — one of Beijing’s most promising paths to forcing acceptance of a new “status quo.”

Taiwan cannot answer this daily assault with crewed warships and cutters of its own. They are expensive, few and prone to escalation. The tool Taiwan is reaching for instead is the uncrewed surface vessel (USV): autonomous craft that can contest coercion at scale, leverage home-field advantage and operate at a far lower cost, all without putting sailors in harm’s way.

The logic is straightforward. The outer, weakest rings — fishing boats and militia posing as trawlers — thrive on Taiwan’s reluctance to confront them, because China Coast Guard and PLAN vessels behind them can turn any Taiwanese response into an escalation. Send a crewed cutter and it is Beijing’s coast guard or navy that rams, escalates and narrates the encounter to the world. A USV changes that calculus: no sailor to intimidate, no crew to endanger, no martyr to manufacture. It can hold persistent presence, document illegal activity and shadow harassers — and if a Chinese hull rams it, the loss is a machine, not a man or his limb. Better still, a nimble USV fitted with spikes could leave that far more expensive Chinese hull worse for the wear just above the waterline, ensuring no captain rams one twice.

Ukraine’s naval drones, which crippled Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, already proved that small, expendable USVs can deny a superior navy freedom of maneuver; Taiwan’s opportunity is to apply that lesson daily, in peacetime, and help dissuade any invasion.

Analysts have begun making the case, and Taiwan has already moved away from matching China’s incursions ship for ship toward integrating uncrewed systems and reserving crewed vessels for enforcement. However, the harder question is, integration for what effect? The Philippines showed the limits of “assertive transparency”: publicizing provocations won sympathy, but cameras have not changed Beijing’s behavior.

Here USVs can do what a camera cannot. Fitted with long-range acoustic devices and directed-light systems, they can make sustained harassment genuinely punishing for militia and coast guard crews — and even for warships loitering inside 24 or 12 nautical miles — degrading morale and effectiveness over time, non-kinetically, without exposing sailors.

The acoustic options invite a distinctly Taiwanese flourish. For decades, Kinmen’s loudspeakers sent the ballads of Teresa Teng (鄧麗君) across the Strait to serenade — and needle — Chinese soldiers; a USV could revive the tradition with a wink: Teng by day to unsettle the militia with nostalgia, and AC/DC’s Thunderstruck at window-rattling volume once darkness falls — leaving Taipei free to joke that the racket is obviously the Australians’ doing.

Beneath the humor sits a serious target, the one variable Beijing cannot replace with more hulls: the willingness of fishers and militia to keep showing up once the cost-benefit calculus turns against them. Cost imposition, not documentation, is what turns presence into deterrence.

None of this exists yet, which is why the coming choices matter. Taiwan’s uncrewed effort spans two tiers. The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) is acquiring 25 high-end, ultra-fast, maneuverable 24-foot USVs — capable, but few — for the day-to-day “gray zone” fight. Separately, it is pursuing a proposed fleet of 1,320 attritable attack boats, cheaper and individually less capable, to saturate the Strait against invasion. Yet neither is in the water: the first of the 25 is unbuilt, and the 1,320 are nowhere near contract. Taiwan is deciding how to fight the “gray zone” before it has the hulls — making the doctrine the most urgent task of all.

Twenty-five boats, however capable, cannot be everywhere at once, and the daily fight demands mass — exactly what the 1,320 could provide, if Taiwan resists treating that fleet as an “in case of emergency, break glass” reserve mothballed until D-Day. A capability held only for the worst day atrophies before it arrives, as crews never gain proficiency, command-and-control goes untested, logistics stay theoretical and tactics never evolve against a real adversary. Worse, it cedes the very contest Beijing is waging now. At least a portion of the attritable fleet should rotate through daily “gray zone” operations alongside the CGA’s boats as it comes online.

Every patrol shadowing a militia boat or mapping a coast guard cordon doubles as a live rehearsal — sharpening operators, hardening datalinks against Chinese jamming and exposing failures far better found in peacetime than in war — while signaling to Beijing that the fleet and the resolve are real.

Critics will say USVs alone cannot resolve Taiwan’s security dilemma. True. No single capability can. However, in a contest defined by attrition, presence and narrative, they give Taiwan what it urgently needs: 24-hour coastal presence, without the political and human costs conventional platforms impose. Not a silver bullet, but a force multiplier for a democracy that cannot continue to cede its waters meter by meter.

Taiwan’s adversary is patient, its campaign built to erode political will and exhaust resources. The answer is not to match China ship for ship, but to field asymmetric, scalable tools — and to decide now that when they arrive, they serve the daily contest, not a war reserve. Taiwan’s ability to contest the war Beijing is already waging may ultimately decide whether D-Day ever comes.

Trey Meeks is a senior adviser to the Asia Group and senior defense fellow for the Center for a New American Security.