![]() To address Taiwan’s arms backlog and fill its remaining needs for high-priority asymmetric capabilities, Washington should accelerate investment in the U.S. efforts to adequately arm Taiwan and deter Chinese aggression. Understanding and addressing the root causes of delays is therefore essential to U.S. In the absence of meaningful investments to close gaps in defense industrial base resiliency and address inefficiencies in the sale-to-delivery timeline, slowing arms transfers to Ukraine or more aggressively prioritizing Taiwan will not fix the latter’s existing weapons backlog. defense industrial base and inefficiencies in the arms sales process. More importantly, though, this narrative distracts from the most important sources of delivery delays: limitations in the U.S. First, it oversimplifies the different pathways through which Taiwan and Ukraine have received weapons up to this point and overstates the degree to which the capabilities required by each country overlap. efforts to arm Taiwan is misleading and harmful. From this perspective, each anti-aircraft missile sent to support Ukraine is one that could have supported Taiwan’s “ porcupine strategy.” Hawley and others are right that the United States will increasingly need to prioritize when it comes to allocating constrained resources across threats from Russia and China, especially as the war in Ukraine wears on and the situation in the Taiwan Strait becomes more precarious.īut the narrative that Washington’s commitments to Ukraine are a primary driver of Taiwan’s weapons backlog or have interfered with U.S. Underlying these concerns is the assumption that Taiwan and Ukraine are competing for the same systems and the same weapons production lines. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission similarly blamed the “diversion of existing stocks of weapons and munitions” to Ukraine for delays in delivery of promised systems to Taiwan. A November 2022 Wall Street Journal article argued that weapons transfers to Ukraine were “aggravating” Taiwan’s weapons shortfall. Hawley is not the first to link military support to Ukraine and Taiwan’s delayed arms deliveries. ![]() ![]() ![]() As evidence, he pointed to Taiwan’s nearly $19 billion weapons backlog. Josh Hawley argued that the Biden administration’s military aid to Ukraine has compromised more important efforts to strengthen Taiwan’s defenses. In a recent letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Sen. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |