So here's some more advice from an author for Taiwan's defense needs:
First, Taiwan must stop spending its scarce defense dollars on expensive conventional weapons. Last year, Taiwan spent more than $2 billion on 108 M1AT Abrams main battle tanks. It maintains a fleet of amphibious assault ships and is trying to acquire even more. Meanwhile, it is still trying to build eight so-called Indigenous Diesel Submarines (IDS). ...
Second, Taiwan needs to devote serious resources and political capital into making the innovative Overall Defense Concept a reality. The brainchild of former Chief of the General Staff, Admiral Lee Hsi-min, the ODC seeks to re-orient the island’s defenses towards a genuinely asymmetric air- and sea-denial posture. ...
Third, Taiwan must overhaul its massive, but increasingly hollow, reserve force. In theory, it can call upon 2.5 million part-time soldiers. In reality, Taiwanese reservists are poorly trained (most spend a mere five days training every other year) and ill-equipped (the army might not even have enough rifles for all of them).
I agree with the author on the third issue so I'll leave it at that. But I find the first suggestion wrong while the second suggestion is just taking a buzz word too far.
Let me address the second point first. Asymmetric capabilities means not trying to match a superior enemy with force-on-force capabilities but seeking their vulnerabilities. The classic is not trying to beat post-Cold War America on a conventional battlefield but to inflict casualties on America with terror and insurgency to seek our presumed weakness of a low casualty threshold. Or to take advantage of our free press and open political system to undermine and divide America at home.
But the concept seems to have evolved into the very normal thing of combined arms. So if Taiwan doesn't try to build a surface navy to counter China but instead seeks coastal defense missiles and sea mines, that is called "asymmetric warfare." Naval mines and land-based anti-ship missiles would make sense even if Taiwan could afford to build a big-ship fleet to fight the PLAN. I think that calling that move "asymmetric warfare" makes the term meaningless.
And for real yucks, if you want to discuss asymmetric warfare, submarines have long been considered exactly that! Germany in two world wars didn't try to wrest control of the seas from the Allies by directly battling their fleets. No, Germany sent subs to strangle Britain's trade lifeline.
But now subs are a dangerous diversion?! In my view subs are vital to Taiwan's defense and actually allow America to intervene early quietly with plausible deniability while we gather forces to intervene openly.
Of course Taiwan should build weapons better able to sink China's invasion fleet! You don't need to dress it up with a mis-used term that can only lead Taiwan astray.
On the first issue, let me return to the article on Taiwan's mines and missiles. A Taiwanese legislator explained the need for these weapons by saying:
“What we mean by asymmetric capabilities is cost effective, but lethal enough to become deterrence - to make any consideration of an invasion very painful,” she said.
The problem with simply trying to defend yourself by seeking to make the price of invading through that barrage is that it relies on knowing how much the enemy is willing to pay. And are you sure that other factors won't change how much the Chinese Communist Party is willing to lose to get an army ashore? The fact is that if China is willing to pay the price, China will throw an army across the Taiwan Strait.
What then?
Well, Taiwan will need a force-on-force capability on the ground to eject the PLA from its Taiwan bridgeheads. Taiwan will be glad to have Abrams tanks and other conventional weapons (although I'll grant that amphibious warfare ships are a luxury now) to have a chance of defeating China.
China can put an army on Taiwan if it is willing to absorb the casualties. You can't avoid that simple fact with repeated attempts to be too clever and seek ways to be "asymmetric" in war.
UPDATE: While looking for other things I found forgotten posts attacking the "asymmetric" option here, here, here, and here, for example. I'm nothing if not consistent.
