Beyond Arms Sales: Building the Taiwan Mesh Fleet Where the Fight Will Be – Defense.info

Beyond Arms Sales: Building the Taiwan Mesh Fleet Where the Fight Will Be  Defense.info

Major Joseph Potter’s new essay for the Center for International Maritime Security, “Arming Taiwan: America First in Action,” makes an argument that deserves a wide hearing. Arming Taiwan, he contends, is neither charity nor entanglement. It is a direct expression of American interest. It deters Chinese aggression, shares the burden of defense with a partner […] Major Joseph Potter’s new essay for the Center for International Maritime Security, “Arming Taiwan: America First in Action,” makes an argument that deserves a wide hearing. Arming Taiwan, he contends, is neither charity nor entanglement. It is a direct expression of American interest. It deters Chinese aggression, shares the burden of defense with a partner willing to fight for itself, and puts foreign money to work rebuilding the American defense industrial base.

Most usefully, Potter identifies the maritime domain as the “clear outlier.” Of roughly $20 billion in U.S. defense packages authorized for Taiwan since 2022, he calculates that only 0.7 percent relates to maritime operations, mostly anti-ship missiles and 30mm gun mounts. Unmanned surface and subsurface systems, he argues, are where Taiwan’s needs and America’s industrial opportunity most clearly meet. I agree with the direction of the argument. Much of my own work over the past two years, from Lessons from the Drone Wars to Lessons in Military Transformation, has been about exactly