Does Iran’s wartime resilience offer any lessons for Taiwan?

Iran’s ability to sustain missile and drone strikes despite heavy US-Israeli attacks has sharpened a debate in Taiwan: if the island’s air defences were degraded in the early stages of a conflict with mainland China, could it still keep fighting? The answer from officials, lawmakers and analysts was cautious but clear. They said the island could be resilient – but only if it shifted away from a missile-heavy defensive mindset towards a more integrated, cost-effective and survivable system. Even after suffering heavy strikes, Tehran continued launching attacks – showing that resilience depended less on preventing damage than on sustaining operations, analysts said. A core lesson from the conflict was that modern air defences rarely failed at once but eroded over time, they added. “The real test is not whether you can intercept on day one, but on which day you start failing,” said Max Lo, executive director of the Taiwan International Strategic Study Society in Taipei. He said the Iran conflict showed that high-end defences were effective but also unsustainable. “US forces burned through billions of dollars’ worth of interceptors in just days, highlighting a structural imbalance between cheap offensive weapons and costly defensive systems,” Lo said, referring to the use of air defences such as Patriot PAC-3 missiles and the THAAD system to counter Iranian attacks in the Gulf. Taiwan faces a similar – if not harsher – challenge. “Unlike Israel or the United States, Taiwan lacks strategic depth and sits within close range of the People’s Liberation Army’s missile, rocket and drone forces,” he said, warning that a cross-strait conflict could involve sustained, high-volume strikes. Once detection systems are degraded, defence becomes far more difficult. “When you lose sensing and targeting, the system can fail very quickly,” Lo said. The lesson has begun to shape policy in Taipei. In a recent report to lawmakers, the defence ministry said expensive interceptors alone could not cope with large-scale attacks, stressing the need for low-cost systems to counter long-range rockets and drones. Under the “Taiwan Shield”, or T-Dome, concept proposed by Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te, the military is building a layered network along the lines of Israel’s Iron Dome. This would integrate US-made Patriot and Nasams missile systems and the home-grown Tien-Kung system with new radar, surveillance and battlefield management tools. A key shift is the push for cheaper interception options – alongside the use of measures such as decoys, jamming satellite navigation systems and electronic warfare – to prevent high-end missiles from being rapidly depleted. The defence ministry said Taiwan was pursuing both indigenous development and the foreign procurement of “low-cost interceptors”, which are a fraction of the cost of conventional systems. The military was also accelerating the process of building up its counter-drone capabilities amid concerns that the PLA could deploy large volumes of low-cost uncrewed systems to overwhelm defences, the report said. Even so, military analysts argued that Taiwan’s ability to fight on after an initial air defence breakdown would depend on survivability. Zivon Wang, a military analyst at the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies in Taipei, said Taiwan’s dense air defence network and the Taiwan Strait could act as a buffer. “The strait offers early warning time, while mobile missile systems and drones can sustain counter-attacks,” he said. But that advantage hinged on dispersion, he added. “If radar, command nodes and launchers are mobile and concealed, the defender can keep fighting. If not, the system can collapse quickly,” Wang said, adding that sufficient ammunition stockpiles would also be critical in a saturation scenario. Retired colonel Chou Yu-ping, a former missile command planner, echoed that view. “What matters is not just precision, but whose system can keep operating under disruption – and who can endure longer under high-intensity attrition,” he said. Chou warned that medium-sized drones posed one of the most serious threats, and called for a layered protection system that combined the use of high-end equipment and short-range air defences along with lower-cost solutions such as upgraded autocannons. Underlying these concerns was what analysts described as the “cost-exchange dilemma”. Iran showed how large volumes of cheap drones and rockets could force defenders to expend high-value interceptors. Beijing appears well positioned to replicate – and scale – this approach, with a growing drone arsenal and long-range rocket capabilities, they said. For Taiwan, that creates a dangerous arithmetic. “Taiwan’s current approach still leans heavily on the most expensive part of the kill chain – terminal interception,” defence analyst Holmes Liao wrote in the US-based National Defence magazine. Beijing, he said, had spent decades building a strike complex designed to saturate and exhaust defences at relatively low cost. “If Taiwan must routinely fire million-dollar interceptors at targets that cost a fraction of that, it will either run out of missiles or be forced to accept leakers [missiles or drones that get through defence systems] that China can exploit,” he warned. That imbalance is compounded by supply concerns, with lawmakers pointing to the rapid depletion of US interceptor stockpiles in the Iran conflict. Wang Ting-yu, a legislator from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, said Taiwan’s high and medium-altitude air defences were relatively strong, but there was not enough protection against long-range rockets. He said the Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, the island’s top weapon developer, should accelerate the development of a low-cost interceptor system. He also pointed to a shift towards long-range strike weapons such as the US-made Himars rocket system, which could force PLA rocket forces to move away from the mainland coast and extend Taiwan’s warning time. Chen Yeong-kang, a legislator from the main opposition Kuomintang, meanwhile, warned that even advanced systems such as Israel’s Iron Dome had limits. “No matter how many missiles you have, they can still be exhausted,” he said, calling for stronger infrastructure protection and more decentralised command systems. Analysts said Iran’s resilience lay not just in absorbing attacks, but in continuing to impose costs through sustained retaliation – enabled by dispersed systems, decentralised command and low-cost weapons. For Taiwan, that pointed to a shift towards what analysts described as “system disruption”. This included electronic warfare to degrade PLA targeting, as well the ability to strike command nodes, launch systems and logistics networks. “The objective is not just to intercept incoming threats, but to break the attacker’s system,” said Shu Hsiao-huang, a researcher at the government-funded Institute for National Defence and Security Research in Taipei. That would require greater investment in intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance – including space-based and airborne sensors – to track and target PLA assets, he added. It also demanded a doctrinal shift, analysts said. “Taiwan does not need to match China weapon for weapon,” Liao said. “It needs to disrupt the system that makes China’s weapons effective.” Iran’s ability to continue attacks underscores both the limits and the possibilities of modern air defence. For Taiwan, the lesson is uncomfortable but clear. “Air defence may not hold indefinitely,” Lo, from the Taiwan International Strategic Study Society, said. But if the system was designed to survive, adapt and strike back, collapse was not inevitable, he said. “The question is whether Taiwan can make that transition in time.” Beijing sees Taiwan as part of China and has never renounced the use of force to reunite it with the mainland. Most countries – including the US, Israel and Iran – do not recognise Taiwan as an independent state. But Washington is opposed to any attempt to take the island and is committed to supplying it with weapons.

Does Iran’s wartime resilience offer any lessons for Taiwan?

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The recent conflict has raised questions about whether the island could keep fighting if its air defences were targeted by the PLA

The recent conflict has raised questions about whether the island could keep fighting if its air defences were targeted by the PLA