Perhaps the strongest sign that Taiwan was on the verge of a strategic breakthrough came in early May, when the Taiwanese legislature, led by the China-friendly Kuomintang (KMT), passed a pared-down version of the special military budget championed by President Lai Ching-te.

After all, detente with China, or soft surrender if you’re being less generous, is a central plank in the KMT’s platform. Its passing a special military budget seems remarkable at first glance.

But in shrinking the special budget to just $25 billion from the proposed $40 billion, the KMT under chair Cheng Li-wun eliminated ^[1] all the most important spending. This was the spending that would help Taiwan grow into an ‘indigestible hedgehog’ – that is, prey too prickly for a larger predator to easily consume.

What got cut out of the special military budget: all domestic programs, including orders for 200,000 small drones. What stayed in: big-ticket purchases of American-made munitions, including Patriot air-defence missiles.

Adding insult to injury, President Donald Trump froze US arms sales to Taiwan around the same time the special military budget passed in Taipei. Calling arms sales to Taiwan ‘a very good negotiating chip’ in talks with President Xi Jinping, Trump paused announced deals for missiles and other weaponry worth $14 billion. Those purchases are among those funded by the approved special military budget.

If Trump continues to withhold his signature on US-Taiwanese arms deals, the $25 billion worth of (mostly) American arms in the special military budget would disappear alongside the Taiwanese arms Lai’s administration had proposed. In that dire scenario, the special budget could go unspent. All that drama for nothing.

What stings the most for friends of a free Taiwan isn’t the possibly temporary disruption to Taiwan’s acquisition of big, expensive American weapons – not just Patriot interceptors but also Javelin anti-tank missiles and rockets for Himars launcher trucks. Those are all useful systems, to be sure.

But what’s even more useful are drones, especially small drones that Taiwan could produce quickly and cheaply without the help of distant and sometimes unreliable allies. Drones are central to Ukraine’s ongoing defence against Russian aggression, and they would surely be central to an effective Taiwanese defence against Chinese aggression.

At precisely the moment Taiwan should, and could, be scaling up drone production, the KMT stepped in to halt the expansion. A big injection of capital would’ve helped Taiwanese forces build up stockpiles, of course. Equally importantly, it would’ve encouraged domestic industry to expand production facilities and workforces and invest in research and development.

It’s almost as if the KMT specifically identified the initiatives that would’ve been most helpful in Taiwan’s long, uneven effort to transform itself into a veritable indigestible hedgehog. Few expect Taiwan to defeat China all by itself, but an effective hedgehog strategy could delay a Chinese victory and buy time for Taiwan’s allies, if any, to intervene.

Those hedgehog initiatives are myriad. Taiwan has been investing in domestic anti-ship and air-defence missiles ^[2] as well as submarines, mines and aerial and seaborne one-way attack drones. Many of those programs run in parallel with acquisitions of similar American systems.

So Taiwan is developing and buying domestic Hsiung Feng anti-ship missiles while also spending billions on American-made Harpoon anti-ship missiles with similar capability. Likewise, Taiwan is acquiring domestic Tien-Kung surface-to-air missiles alongside American-made Patriot surface-to-air missiles and other foreign-designed air-defence missiles.

Taiwan is buying domestically made Thunderbolt-2000 surface-to-surface rocket launchers at the same time it’s spending big on American Himars and associated ammunition. Taipei has bought American drones while also mapping out a major, and much more important, expansion of its own drone industry ^[3].

Given the risk of a Chinese blockade preceding a direct attack on the island, Taiwan needs this kind of redundancy. But redundancy in small drones could be most critical. In the two years after Russia widened its war on Ukraine, the Ukrainian drone industry grew from essentially nothing to a sprawling enterprise producing literally millions of tiny, explosive first-person-view (FPV) drones and hundreds of thousands of long-range one-way attack drones every year.

The FPVs hunt Russian troops along the front line. The long-range drones pummel Russian supply lines, air bases, factories and refineries.

To buy time for the expansion, outnumbered Ukrainian forces traded away much of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, once home to millions of Ukrainians. Taiwan, which is just 6 percent the size of Ukraine by area, simply can’t trade space for time. If and when China invades, Taiwan’s drone industry must already be ready to churn out the millions of drones Taiwanese forces would need for an effective defence.

But it won’t be ready without government investment. The KMT is fighting to make that investment, and the readiness it buys, impossible. Taiwan is a baby hedgehog. It may never get a chance to grow up into something indigestible.