U.S. Military Aid to Taiwan Lacks Critical Balance, Expert Warns

By Brian Freeman | Wednesday, 24 December 2025

At a recent Hudson Institute think tank event, U.S.-Taiwan Business Council President Rupert Hammond-Chambers warned that the state of U.S. military aid to Taiwan is out of balance.

While the United States has increasingly supplied Taiwan with asymmetric weapons intended to deter and defeat a potential Chinese invasion, Hammond-Chambers argued that Taiwan requires a more balanced arsenal to counter scenarios such as sustained blockades.

“U.S. weapons sales have ‘swung from one extreme’ — the arms deals years ago for MQ-9 Reaper drones, M1A2 Abrams tanks, and F-16 Fighting Falcon jets — ‘to the other extreme where we’re only doing asymmetric,’ a shift he warned leaves potential vulnerabilities,” Hammond-Chambers stated.

U.S. officials have maintained that survivable, distributed, and networked systems are better suited to helping Taiwan counter China’s daily gray-zone pressure as well as complicating Beijing’s designs in a crisis or blockade.

Despite Taiwan’s focus on building asymmetric capabilities to deter full-scale invasion, Hammond-Chambers emphasized that military support must shift toward greater balance. “We are not doing every day, and there needs to be a swing back,” he said.

The Taiwanese defense ministry has asserted that the U.S. continues to assist in maintaining sufficient self-defense capabilities and rapidly building strong deterrent power through asymmetric warfare advantages, which it claims form the foundation for regional peace and stability.

One of Taiwan’s most pressing challenges is developing an independent weapons production capacity should a blockade prevent external assistance. Retired Admiral Lee Hsi-Min, former chief of the general staff for Taiwan’s Defense Ministry, suggested at the event that Taiwan should produce weapons at scale on the island rather than relying primarily on co-production or foreign supply.

Experts and officials have long stressed the need for a stronger local defense supply chain to ensure operational capability if outside support is delayed. However, Betsy Shieh, former senior commercial officer with the U.S. Department of Commerce, noted that while Taiwan’s domestic industry can develop weapons, “the fastest way to production is to license American and Ukrainian and European designs and to produce on island.”

Shieh added that Taiwanese companies would learn to innovate through this process, but in the short term, “license, license, license, build on island” remains critical.