Late in April, a batch of American-made M1A2 Abrams tanks arrived by sea in the Port of Taipei. The 28 M1A2s are the last of 108 Abrams tanks that Taiwan bought from the United States for US$1.3 billion (A$1.8 billion) back in 2019.

Among the most sophisticated tanks in the world, the M1A2s are also a symbol – but not the symbol of strength that Taiwanese leaders surely hope. Instead, they are symbols of weakness. For too long, Taiwan has armed itself with the wrong weapons.

The 74-ton, four-person M1A2 was designed for a kind of warfare that is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. As the wars in Ukraine and Iran have proved, the future belongs to small, light, autonomous weapons that can be continuously upgraded and built quickly in huge quantities: propeller-driven strike missiles, remotely deployed mines, explosive robotic boats, long-range jet cruise missiles and scalable defences against these same weapons.

Systems like those are what could transform Taiwan into a porcupine – prey too prickly to grab easily or quickly. Taiwan is on the verge of pivoting to a defensive strategy based on small, cheap and autonomous munitions. A US$40 billion special defence budget proposed by President Lai Ching-te was heavily weighted toward drones and missiles. But opposition lawmakers from the China-friendly KMT party slashed some of those elements of it.

As long as the KMT further delays an already delayed military transformation, Taiwan must plan to fight China’s overwhelmingly more numerous ships, planes, missiles and troops with the weapons it already has. Some are still useful. Others are deadweight.

Among ground warfare systems, the deadweight includes:

Tanks

In addition to those new M1A2s, the Taiwanese army and marine corps have hundreds of older M60A3 and CM-11 tanks. If the war in Ukraine is any indication, all are extremely (and more or less equally) vulnerable to tiny explosive drones.

After losing thousands of tanks each, Russian and Ukrainian forces have found new uses for the survivors. Heaping layers of anti-drone armour onto them and fitting them with mine-clearing plows or rollers, the Russians and Ukrainians now use tanks mostly as glorified engineering vehicles whose primary role is to shepherd lighter vehicles and infantry across the drone-patrolled no-man’s-land that, after four years of fighting, now stretches the breadth of eastern Ukraine.

Does anyone expect that Taiwan’s outnumbered military will hold out long enough for a similar no-man’s-land to form on the island? If not, then what are Taiwan’s tanks for?

Self-propelled howitzers

Artillery has dominated land warfare for centuries, and it’s no less important in the drone age. But not all artillery is created equal. For decades, military planners assumed the biggest threat to an army’s artillery was the enemy’s own artillery, which could be expected to quickly shoot back every time a battery opened fire and gave away its position.

No longer. Now the same tiny drones that have driven tanks to the edge of irrelevance are the main danger to any howitzers the drones can catch out in the open. When enemy counterbattery fire was the problem, the popular solution was self-propelled howitzers that could move under their own power shortly after firing, a practice that gunners call ‘shoot and scoot’.

Now that drones relentlessly hunt moving howitzers, frequently moving isn’t an option. A gun and its crew must dig in, fortify and hope to avoid drawing the drones’ attention. Given the threat, complex and costly self-propelled guns such as Taiwan’s hundreds of American-made M109s and M110s are far less cost-effective than smaller, simpler towed guns that are easier to hide in dugouts.

The Taiwanese army and marine corps already possess a few hundred older towed guns. But recent procurement has favoured the pricier mobile guns, including 40 M109A6s Taipei ordered for US$750 million back in 2021. The 60 M109A7s Taiwan plans to buy as part of the stalled special military budget indicate Taiwanese planners still think big guns can shoot and scoot – and survive.

Helicopters

Even before Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, helicopters were extremely vulnerable to enemy air defences including ground-based missiles and guns. The advent of cheap interceptor drones, designed to collide with other drones and crewed aircraft, has made slow and low rotorcraft exponentially more vulnerable.

It’s not for no reason both Russia and Ukraine have pulled almost all of their helicopters from front-line roles and now assign them to rear-area air defences against the lowest and slowest enemy surveillance and attack drones. Sensing a technological shift, the world’s leading militaries are now abandoning manned rotorcraft. Japan plans to retire all 60 or so of its manned attack helicopters and shift their budget line to drones. The US is also cutting attack helicopters in favour of unmanned systems.

The Taiwanese army has more than 120 attack and armed observation helicopters that are fast becoming obsolete. Wisely, Taipei hasn’t proposed buying more attack helicopters. Unwisely, it hasn’t signalled it will follow Tokyo and Washington and ground the vulnerable rotorcraft in order to spend more money on drones.