Key Points and Summary: While Ukraine’s air force survived Russia’s initial assault through widespread dispersal, Taiwan likely cannot replicate this feat against a potential Chinese invasion.
-This analysis argues Taiwan’s smaller geography and limited airfields (~50 vs. Ukraine’s 900+) make hiding its ~400 fighters extremely difficult. China’s massive missile arsenal could overwhelm defenses and destroy most Taiwanese aircraft on the ground early in a conflict—a conclusion supported by expert analysis and wargames.
-Despite potential Chinese missile inventory limits, relying on the survivability of Taiwan’s air force is deemed unrealistic, suggesting a greater need for concealable ground-based defenses.
Sitting Ducks? China’s Missiles Pose Existential Threat to Taiwan’s Jets
The Ukrainian air force went to war against invading Russian forces in February 2022 with just 125 combat aircraft concentrated at around a dozen large bases. Given Russia’s overwhelming deep-strike advantage—hundreds of deployed warplanes and thousands of cruise and ballistic missiles—few observers expected the Ukrainian brigades to survive the first hours of the war.
But they did survive. And 38 months later, they’re still surviving—and flying daily air-defence and strike sorties.
It has been an incredible feat. Can the equally outgunned Taiwanese air force duplicate it?
Almost certainly not. Geography, and the scale of the Chinese threat, will be harder on Taiwan’s air force and its 400 fighters.
The Ukrainian air force escaped the initial Russian bombardment because, tipped off by Ukrainian and allied intelligence agencies, it had dispersed its people, planes and munitions away from the big air bases. It spread forces across potentially scores of smaller civilian airfields and even stretches of highway. ‘The targets of each strike had moved by the time the missiles hit their designated aiming points,’ analysts Justin Bronk, Nick Reynolds and Jack Watling wrote in a 2022 study for the Royal United Services Institute in London.
The Ukrainian flying brigades have kept up this practice throughout the war. Indeed, they’ve suffered the most losses when they’ve become lax in their dispersal routine. A cluster of deep strikes by Russian Iskander ballistic missiles in July destroyed several jets, including hard-to-replace Sukhoi Su-27 interceptors, on the ground at easily-surveilled air bases near the front line.
Even with constant vigilance, which the Ukrainians haven’t been able to sustain, the Taiwanese might not be able to dodge incoming Chinese missiles. ‘Geography constrains dispersal,’ says Eric Heginbotham, a principal research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Security Studies Program and a specialist in Asian security issues. His research has looked closely at the survivability of the Taiwanese air force.
Ukraine is 20 times as big as Taiwan by area and has many, many more airfields: more than 900, compared with about 50 Taiwanese ones, according to Spottingmode.com, an aviation data website. That limits the potential for the much bigger Taiwanese air force to survive by spreading out.
There are complications. ‘Taiwan’s air bases’—there are 10 of them—‘are quite large, and it has some room to disperse on air bases,’ Heginbotham says. ‘Taitung air base on the east side of the country also has underground shelters, and some aircraft might survive in these.’
But China’s huge, and growing, arsenal of ballistic and cruise missiles could erase any margin for hope on the part of Taiwanese planners. ‘China can maintain a large and near continuous missile bombardment that would effectively neutralize most if not all of Taiwan’s air force—at least during the opening two weeks or so,’ the analyst says.
That’s not just conjecture. In a series of rigorous war games overseen by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in January 2023, Heginbotham and other analysts consistently reached the same conclusion. ‘The invasion always starts the same way: an opening bombardment destroys most of Taiwan’s navy and air force in the first hours of hostilities.’
It’s not for no reason the California think-tank RAND has long advocated for Taiwan to spend less money buying fighters and more money on ground-based air-defences, which should be easier to hide on Taiwan’s rugged terrain. The Chinese military ‘has been turning up the temperature on Taiwan’s fighter force and now has the means to destroy it (or force it into underground storage),’ RAND concluded in 2016.
If there’s a glimmer of hope, it’s that China’s rocket force, the military branch built around surface-launched strike missiles, will be heavily tasked. Yes, it has thousands of missiles. But it’s taken decades for the rocket force to build up its inventory. Once the missiles are spent, there’s no quick and easy way to replace them. ‘Both sides have finite magazine depth, so both have to pick and choose targets,’ Heginbotham says.
And surviving fragments of the Taiwanese air force might have some effect on the war.
All that said, it’d be lunacy for Taiwan to count on its extremely vulnerable air force, crowded on a small number of bases, to save the island from an invading Chinese army.
When advocates of defence reform in Taiwan plead with the government to spend more on concealable missiles and tiny drones, they’re not just advocating for fancy new technologies. They’re acknowledging the uncomfortable but undeniable reality: in a full-scale war, Taiwan’s air force almost certainly has a shockingly short life-expectancy.
About the Author: David Axe
David Axe is a journalist and filmmaker based in Columbia, South Carolina. He joined Forbes in 2020, and currently focuses on Ukraine. This first appeared in ASPI’s The Strategist website.
