Homegrown Defense

FORUM Staff

With its MK44 Bushmaster 30 mm chain gun giving it a firing range of 3 kilometers, the Taiwan Army’s CM-34 Clouded Leopard can stalk an enemy across all terrains and in all conditions at speeds up to 100 kilometers per hour. By 2023, more than 300 of the eight-wheeled armored vehicles manufactured in central Taiwan should be operational. Named for a big cat believed to be extinct on the island but considered sacred to Taiwan’s Indigenous peoples, the Clouded Leopard also is a potent symbol of a rapidly accelerating domestic defense industry — part of a trend of homegrown military advances seen across the Indo-Pacific region.

A few weeks before Taiwan showcased the CM-34 at a mountainous test site in June 2022, South Korean researchers unveiled an artificial intelligence-based application that could, one day, complement military vehicles such as the Clouded Leopard. The self-driving technology analyzes unconventional terrain to plot navigable routes with limited human input, even at high speed, the Yonhap news agency reported. The project is spearheaded by Seoul’s state-run Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA), which promotes domestic development of technologies vital to national security. In the days surrounding its self-driving technology announcement, DAPA also revealed plans for a mobile laser device to disarm unexploded ordnance, a long-range radar to monitor the nation’s airspace and a lightweight helmet capable of withstanding stronger rounds. In late July 2022, South Korea became one of a handful of nations with a domestically built supersonic fighter jet, with the maiden flight of the KF-21 Boramae. By 2030, the Republic of Korea Air Force is expected to deploy 120 KF-21s as part of the joint development project with Indonesia, CNN reported.

A litany of generation-defining challenges — from a crushing pandemic to communist China’s aggressive military expansion and Russia’s assault on Ukraine — is spurring such efforts throughout the Indo-Pacific to boost domestic development of weapons systems and other defense assets. To lessen reliance on imports, particularly from problematic sources such as Russia, whose arms industry has been decimated by international sanctions, governments in India, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and elsewhere are investing heavily in their defense sectors as they secure the means of protecting national sovereignty amid geopolitical vagaries and evolving threats.

“In order to adapt to increasingly rapid changes in the security environment, Japan must strengthen its defense capability at speeds that are fundamentally different from the past,” Japan’s Defense Ministry declared in its “2021 Defense of Japan” white paper, which called for the development of aircraft, destroyers, a submarine, missiles, combat vehicles, satellites and electronic warfare systems. The Defense Ministry sought a ninth consecutive increase in military spending as its builds a multidomain force. “Chinese military trends, combined with insufficient transparency about China’s defense policies and military affairs, have become a matter of grave concern to the region including Japan and the international community,” the white paper noted.

Japan also is developing hypersonic aircraft and weapons, including cruise missiles, that can travel at least five times the speed of sound. As part of the project by the Japanese Defense Ministry’s Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Agency, researchers in mid-2022 conducted their first combustion flight test for hypersonic capabilities, The Japan Times newspaper reported. To fortify its domestic defense industry while also nurturing multinational collaboration, the Japanese government may ease export rules to add to the dozen or so defense equipment and technology transfer agreements it has with partners such as Australia, India and the Philippines, Kyodo News reported in mid-2022. Not only has the world faced “unprecedented difficulties due to COVID-19, but various security challenges and destabilizing factors became more tangible and acute, and the international order based on universal values, which has underpinned the peace and prosperity of the international community, has been greatly tested,” then-Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi noted in the white paper’s introduction. “In order to counter these challenges in the security environment, it is essential not only to strengthen Japan’s own defense capabilities and expand the roles we can fulfill, but also to closely cooperate with countries that share the same fundamental values.”

Reinforced Resolve

Nowhere, perhaps, are the region’s security challenges more tangible than in Taiwan, separated from the Chinese coast by 160 kilometers of the Taiwan Strait — a natural moat that may seem evermore narrow to the self-governed island’s 24 million residents as a bellicose Chinese Communist Party (CCP) increasingly threatens to use force to impose its claims of sovereignty over Taiwan. A record number of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft breached Taiwan’s air defense identification zone in 2022, widely seen to be part of the CCP’s gray-zone warfare to wear out and, eventually, overwhelm Taiwan’s defenses. In August 2022, the PLA conducted its largest live-fire drills in and around the strait, including launching multiple ballistic missiles, several of which landed in waters inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone. The destabilizing drills were condemned as being an apparent retaliation for visits to Taiwan by lawmakers from Indo-Pacific democracies including Japan and the United States. Meanwhile, Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Wei Fenghe threatened during an international security summit in Singapore in June 2022 that the CCP would “not hesitate to fight” if Taiwan pursued independence, even though the island has never been part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 heightened fears of a CCP assault on Taiwan, with analysts contending that CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping may see the war in Europe as an opportunity to fine-tune PLA war plans. Xi refused to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin or join much of the world in sanctioning Moscow over its unprovoked attack, instead reiterating the CCP’s “no-limits” friendship with Russia. For Taiwan, the clearest parallel with Ukraine is that both “are peace-loving democracies that are the objects of belligerent irredentism on the part of more militarily powerful and threatening neighboring autocracies,” noted a March 2022 analysis by the United States Institute of Peace, an independent think tank. 

Since first being elected in 2016, Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has prioritized modernization of the island’s military forces, including domestic development of submarines, stealth warships, minelaying ships and high-tech, mobile weapons that can deliver precision strikes and are difficult for an enemy to target. Known as the “porcupine strategy,” Taiwan’s focus on asymmetric defense is designed to make the costs of conflict unpalatable for an invader. “The idea is to become so hard to swallow that the enemy thinks twice about launching any action,” retired Adm. Lee Hsi-min, who served as chief of the Taiwan Armed Forces general staff, told The New York Times newspaper in June 2022.

Taiwan’s Defense Ministry announced a more than doubling of its annual missile production capacity to nearly 500 in 2022, including developing a bunker-busting weapon with a range of 1,000 kilometers that could hit military bases in China, and a surface-to-air munition that could destroy fighter jets and cruise missiles. That came on the heels of plans to manufacture attack drones, Reuters reported. To further harden its defenses, Taiwan approved U.S. $8.2 billion in extra military spending over the next several years, about two-thirds of which is earmarked for domestically manufactured missiles and anti-ship weapons.

Those homegrown projects are reinforced with military sales from traditional Indo-Pacific partners, including U.S. $120 million in naval equipment and parts from the U.S. in June 2022. The purchase, Taipei’s third from Washington in six months, “once again demonstrates that the robust cooperative partnership between Taiwan and the U.S. is helping bolster Taiwan’s self-defense capabilities,” Taiwan Presidential Office spokesperson Xavier Chang said in a statement. “Taiwan, situated on the frontline of authoritarian expansionism, will continue to firmly demonstrate its resolve in self-defense while … enhancing cooperation with like-minded countries in order to uphold peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and the Indo-Pacific region, jointly strengthening global democratic resilience.”

Seeking Self-Reliance

For India, the world’s third-biggest military spender in 2021, relations with the PRC and Russia are fueling its push toward self-reliance in defense manufacturing. In the Himalayas, India is locked in a border standoff with the PRC, a decadeslong dispute that erupted in a deadly skirmish between the nations’ military forces in mid-2020 and threatens to tumble into conflict again as disengagement talks move at a glacial pace. More recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — broadly denounced as a war on democratic ideals and the rules-based international order — has raised questions about India’s long dependence on Moscow as its major source of weapons, particularly given the stringent sanctions levied against Putin’s regime and the strain on Russia’s military and industrial base. Such factors compound persistent concerns among foreign buyers, including India, over the poor quality of Russian-made fighter aircraft, tanks and other weapons systems. “We estimate that the pervasive corruption in the Russian defense industry and the system of state defense orders hangs this country 20-25 years behind the world arms leaders,” the Robert Lansing Institute for Global Threats and Democracies Studies, a nonprofit think tank, noted in an April 2021 report.

Since 2010, 62% of India’s arms imports have come from Russia, making New Delhi the biggest foreign customer for Moscow’s arms dealers, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). “The requirements of the Russian military itself, with the kind of losses that it is suffering [in Ukraine], may mean some of those spares that we need will probably get diverted,” retired Indian Army Lt. Gen. D.S. Hooda told The Diplomat magazine in April 2022.

India’s military spending spiked by 33% in the past decade, topping U.S. $76 billion in 2021 and placing it behind only the U.S. and the PRC, SIPRI reported in April 2022. “In a push to strengthen the indigenous arms industry, 64% of capital outlays in the military budget of 2021 were earmarked for acquisitions of domestically produced arms,” the report found. The Indian government established two defense industrial corridors, and the nation’s Defence Ministry expects orders totaling U.S. $28 billion to be placed with domestic state-run and private defense firms in the next five years, according to The Diplomat. Under the auspices of the Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO), Indian firms are producing air defense and electronic warfare systems, multibarrel rocket launchers, short- and long-range missiles, tanks and light combat aircraft. The nation’s first domestically built aircraft carrier, the INS Vikrant, was commissioned in September 2022.

In mid-2022, the Defence Ministry signed a contract with a state-run company to equip Indian Air Force and Indian Navy aircraft with Astra Mk-I air-to-air missiles, using technology developed by the DRDO. The project is a major step toward self-reliance, retired Indian Air Marshal Anil Chopra told the Hindustan Times newspaper. “We have been dependent on Russian and Israeli missile systems,” said Chopra, director general of the New Delhi-based Centre for Air Power Studies. “The local production of the Astra missile fills a critical gap in indigenous capabilities.”

In 2020, the Indian government announced a phased import ban on more than 100 types of weapons and systems ranging from sniper rifles to missile destroyers, according to Forbes magazine. The prohibition has expanded to more than 300 categories of military assets as part of the government’s “self-reliant India” campaign, or Atmanirbhar Bharat. At the same time, India is inviting partners such as the U.S. to collaborate with its defense industry. The India-U.S. relationship is built on “cooperation on the enhancement of defense capabilities and now a new emphasis on co-development and coproduction,” Indian Defence Minister Rajnath Singh told the American Chamber of Commerce in India in April 2022, days after attending ministerial-level meetings in Washington, D.C. “In a decade, starting from a negligible base, defense supplies from the U.S. have exceeded U.S. $20 billion,” Singh told the business group in New Delhi, according to The Times of India newspaper. “With increasing business, we aspire for increased investments by the U.S. defense companies in India under the ‘Make in India’ program.”

Securing Sovereignty

Defending territorial integrity — whether in the Himalayas or the South China Sea — is one of multiple factors driving domestic defense projects across the Indo-Pacific, according to the head of U.S. land forces in the region. “There are so many things changing right now, from technology to weapons development to concepts to the review of the types of capabilities that [nations] are making investments in and the amount of money that it takes,” Gen. Charles Flynn, commander of U.S. Army Pacific, told FORUM during the international Land Forces Pacific symposium in Hawaii in May 2022. “I’m certainly hearing and seeing and sensing more of a territorial-defense type of discussion. Between 2014 and 2018, when I was here as a major general in the 25th [Infantry Division] and then as the deputy commanding general, that was not part of the discussion.

“There is this sense that there’s a competition for resources,” Flynn said. “And national sovereignty and the sovereign rights to minerals, fresh water, food and those things that maintain a stable society … I think there are tensions and threats against those. And I think that, in some ways, that’s a change that’s happening here in the region.”

For Thailand, a treaty ally of the U.S. and partner for 190 years and the second-largest economy in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the perils to its national security and sovereignty encompass territorial disputes, such as those with neighboring Cambodia and Laos in recent decades, as well as domestic terrorism and transnational crime, particularly the drug trade in the notorious Golden Triangle cross-border region. The constitutional monarchy’s defense budget was projected to top U.S. $7 billion in 2022, equating to 1.3% of gross domestic product, according to the International Trade Administration (ITA), an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department. “The Thai government also plans to develop its domestic defense industry to reduce the country’s dependence on imports, promote technology transfer, and strengthen national security,” the ITA reported in August 2021.

Among other measures, the Thai government prioritized the local defense industry in its 20-year national strategy and is establishing a defense industrial zone to promote public-private partnerships. “Thailand has been transiting away from an import-based defense procurement using foreign manufacturers by building a resilient, indigenous defense industrial base,” according to “A Glimpse of Thailand’s Defence Industry in the 21st Century,” an October 2021 webinar by the nation’s Defence Technology Institute, which is targeting dual-use advances such as unmanned vehicles, virtual reality and simulators, communications, and rocket guidance systems. “The priority is on technology transfer for defense procurement programs which support the development of local industry and increase the efficiency of Thai military activities, supplying domestic military forces, focusing on R&D [research and development] and upgrading both efficiency and technology.”

A Looming Challenge

Thailand’s defense spending helped push global military expenditures past U.S. $2 trillion for the first time in 2021, with the top five nations — the U.S., the PRC, India, the United Kingdom and Russia — accounting for 62% of the total, according to SIPRI. Among Indo-Pacific partners that hiked their budgets, a common threat loomed. “China’s growing assertiveness in and around the South and the East China seas has become a major driver of military spending in countries such as Australia and Japan,” SIPRI senior researcher Dr. Nan Tian said in a news release. “An example is the AUKUS trilateral security agreement between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States that foresees the supply of eight nuclear-powered submarines to Australia at an estimated cost of up to [U.S.] $128 billion.” Under the AUKUS pact signed in September 2021, the three allies also are collaborating on advanced capability initiatives such as artificial intelligence, cyber, electronic warfare, hypersonics and counterhypersonics, and quantum technologies. “As our work progresses on these and other critical defense and security capabilities, we will seek opportunities to engage allies and close partners,” the White House said in a statement marking AUKUS’s first anniversary.

Despite the pandemic’s catastrophic economic fallout, with shuttered factories and stalled supply chains, the PRC’s military spending jumped 4.7% to more than U.S. $290 billion in 2021, according to SIPRI estimates. That extended a streak of annual increases dating to 1995 — the same year that the People’s Liberation Army sparked what came to be known as the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis by firing missiles and conducting war games in the strategic waterway as Taiwan prepared to hold its first democratic election for president. The CCP’s menacing of the island ended after the U.S. deployed aircraft carrier battle groups to the region.

The prospect of another crisis in the strait is of acute concern to Tokyo, which has protested Beijing’s territorial incursions around the Japanese-controlled and Chinese-claimed Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. Japan’s Defense Ministry cited Taiwan in its annual white paper for the first time in 2021, noting that: “Stabilizing the situation surrounding Taiwan is important for Japan’s security and the stability of the international community. Therefore, it is necessary that we pay close attention to the situation with a sense of crisis more than ever before.”

Deterring a calamitous conflict in the region was a catalyst for Japan to boost defense spending by 7.3% to U.S. $54.1 billion in 2021, its biggest increase in 50 years, according to SIPRI. The upward trajectory is unlikely to change anytime soon; Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in mid-2022 pledged to “substantially increase” defense spending to buttress his nation’s military capacity, Reuters reported. “There have been attempts to unilaterally change the status quo by force in East Asia, making regional security increasingly severe,” Kishida’s administration noted in a draft economic policy. “We will drastically strengthen defense capabilities that will be the ultimate collateral to secure national security.”