By Guarav Sen

In any future Taiwan Strait conflict, the opening phase would be decisive – not because it guarantees victory, but because it shapes escalation, operational momentum, and political decision-making. The identification of a centre of gravity in Taiwan’s defence is therefore contingent on the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) campaign objectives, which vary across firepower-strike, invasion, and blockade scenarios.

Taiwan’s integrated air defence system functions as a scenario-dependent operational centre of gravity, most clearly in a PLA firepower-strike or decapitation campaign. While unlikely on its own to determine the outcome in all contingencies, integrated air defence plays a central role in shaping the battlespace. An analysis of Taiwan’s air defence is particularly salient as nations assess lessons from the recent U.S. strike and leadership-targeting operations, and recognize that neutralizing defence air systems is a critical enabling capability in invasion and blockade scenarios.

By denying rapid air superiority and preserving Taiwan’s combat power, the integrated air defence complicates efforts to achieve a swift fait accompli and raises the costs and risks of PLA operations.¹ This article examines the interplay between integrated air defence and the broader PLA campaign options, assessing how its survivability influences the feasibility of coercion, blockade, and amphibious invasion.

PLA Campaign Logic Across Scenarios

PLA operational planning emphasizes methodical sequencing of action rather than a single decisive engagement. A campaign could shift from initial firepower-strike and paralysis efforts toward a coercive blockade or, if conditions permit, an amphibious invasion. Each option places different demands on air superiority, command and control, and escalation management, making Taiwan’s air defence posture central to shaping the viability of PLA courses of action.

The Opening Salvo: Fire and Electrons

A PLA campaign could begin with a multi-domain strike designed to induce strategic paralysis, rather than a fleet posture offshore that is immediately detectable, attributable, and escalatory.² Roughly 900 short-range ballistic missiles fielded by the PLA Rocket Force are aimed at Taiwan, alongside hundreds of land-attack cruise missiles and long-range guided rockets. Such weapons place island targets at risk from mainland firing points.

However, as Russia’s campaign against Ukraine demonstrates, even sustained missile and drone saturation struggles to produce strategic paralysis against a defended state and instead yields diminishing returns as air and missile defences adapt.³ The experience of Ukraine offers a useful comparison. Large-scale saturation attacks using missiles and one-way attack drones have imposed high costs and strained air defences, but have failed to produce strategic paralysis, instead pushing the conflict toward prolonged attrition as a functional, integrated air defence remains in place.

Concurrent with missile barrages, the PLA Navy Air Force could unleash thousands of precision-strike sorties in the initial days.⁴ Its Eastern and Southern Theatre Commands already field a modern fleet of over 950 fighters and 300 bombers or attack aircraft.⁵ This includes J-16 multirole fighters and low-observable J-20s armed with long-range PL-15 air-to-air missiles.⁶ Air bases, ports, radar sites, command-and-control nodes, and surface-to-air missile batteries would be the primary targets in Taiwan to blind, break, and constrain Taiwan at sea and in the air.⁷

Kinetic barrages will be combined with non-kinetic operations. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) would use a combination of electronic warfare and cyber tools to interfere with early warning radars, jam satellite communications, penetrate networks, and use decoys to drain finite interceptor stocks.⁸ The doctrine of “systems destruction warfare” seeks to collapse an adversary’s operational architecture rather than engage in platform-versus-platform attrition, although they possess the numbers to do so.⁹

Special Operations, Air Assault, and Shaping Actions

PLA special operations forces and pre-positioned networks would likely focus on targeting critical nodes—air defence command elements, sensors, communications infrastructure, and key political or military leadership—rather than holding terrain. Air assault forces would aim to seize or disrupt airfields, ports, and chokepoints to enable follow-on operations. Low-signature platforms such as helicopters or gyrocopters pose a detection challenge, but remain vulnerable to short-range air defences, visual acquisition, and networked cueing from integrated sensor systems.

Years of “grey-zone” activity or military actions below the threshold of open conflict set the table. Frequent PLA Air Force air defence identification zone incursions and surrounding naval drills signal, degrade Taiwan’s readiness, and enable ongoing reconnaissance. Every Taiwan radar activation reveals location, frequency, and modes, refining future targeting and prioritization.¹⁰ Grey-zone efforts normalize tension, compress warning time, and blur the distinction between exercise and attack, complicating mobilization and defence.¹¹ These preparatory activities negatively shape the environment in which Taiwan’s air defence system must function from the very first hours of conflict.

The Layered Shield: Architecture, Integration, and Vulnerabilities

If Taiwan’s air defence system survives—even in degraded form—it becomes a key enabler of Taiwan’s Overall Defence Concept, a planning framework that emphasizes force preservation, littoral denial, and the destruction of invading forces at the beachhead.¹² Amphibious success requires local air superiority.¹³ A functioning air defence system complicates PLA Air Force air dominance, forcing higher-altitude standoff operations that dilute close air support and defensive fires for landing forces.¹⁴

Under this air denial umbrella, Taiwan’s mobile Hsiung Feng anti-ship missile batteries and fast attack craft can turn the Strait into a kill zone.¹⁵ Without functioning air defence, China’s air forces could hunt down these dispersed assets; however, with air defence in place, lightly defended support ships are exposed, creating a sustainment dilemma for Beijing. Even in a blockade scenario, the PLA Navy must still sustain persistent surveillance, air–maritime coordination, and enforcement against blockade-running; functions that become more costly and escalation-prone when operating under a surviving, even degraded, Taiwanese air defence. Air defence undermines the notion that a blockade is a low-risk coercive option.

Taiwan has spent decades building one of the world’s most integrated air defence systems, which is designed to detect, track, and engage everything from ballistic missiles to low-flying drones.¹⁶ Its philosophy is defence-in-depth with multiple supporting layers. Each layer can be ablative, reducing incoming attacks and protecting key assets, allowing forces to continue fighting.¹⁷

Included in these layers, the AN/FPS-115 Pave Paws radar at Leshan provides early warning of incoming ballistic threats from deep within the mainland.¹⁸ Pave Paws also feeds into a resilient network of fixed and mobile long-range air-search radars.¹⁹

Six E-2K Hawkeye airborne early warning and control aircraft add a flexible, high-altitude “look-down” capability against low-flying cruise missiles and stealthier threats, pushing the detection envelope far into the Taiwan Strait. When integrated with passive sensors and ground-based networks to mitigate the vulnerabilities of emitting systems, together the system forces China to allocate scarce long-range interceptors and strike assets to hunt these platforms rather than employ them elsewhere.²⁰

Taiwan fields multiple layers of medium- and high-altitude air and missile defences designed to counter aircraft, cruise missiles, and short-range ballistic missiles. While some interceptors are optimized for engaging aircraft, the backbone of Taiwan’s ballistic missile defence consists of hit-to-kill interceptors. These interceptors are intended to destroy incoming missiles by kinetic impact rather than proximity detonation. The operationalization of an enhanced upper-tier interceptor, expected in the mid-2020s, is intended to expand the defended battlespace in both range and altitude, strengthening Taiwan’s ability to absorb and attrit large missile salvos in the opening phase of a conflict.

Taiwan’s air defence posture continues to rely on a layered architecture in which a mid-tier capability focuses on engaging aircraft and cruise-missiles, while a dispersed short-range air defence network provides terminal and point defence against low-altitude threats.

Observations from recent high-intensity conflicts, particularly Ukraine’s experience with contested airspace, have reinforced Taiwan’s emphasis on prioritising the defence of critical assets under conditions of constrained air-surveillance coverage. This has encouraged a defensive posture that relies heavily on high-end interceptors to manage high-value threats. While such a layered approach improves localised situational awareness and asset protection at the tactical level, it also deepens dependence on scarce and costly upper-tier capabilities.

The combined sensors and shooters are operational and integrated within the Republic of China (Taiwan) Air Force Air Defence and Missile Command. Looking ahead, the planned T-Dome project aims to further decentralize command and control by improving sensor–shooter integration and shortening decision-making timelines.²¹ Rather than relying on a single command node, the system is intended to allow multiple sensors to cue interceptors more flexibly, improving resilience against a decapitation strike.

The systems of the combined forces are integrated so that each sensor can be activated and used to direct fire and engage enemy formations, creating a highly efficient, low-latency tactical engagement core. This is expected to create a far more active tactical posture in anticipation of a decapitation strike or a tactical battle.²²

Strategic self-reliance underwrites Taiwan’s defence concept. To offset delays in U.S. arms deliveries and the risk of wartime isolation,  National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST) has prioritized domestic production. NCSIST’s new goal of producing over 1,000 missiles yearly will be very useful. Programs that are hitting their goals early, such as the TK-3, signal credible sustainment in the wartime scenario and the capacity to sustain wartime operations without immediate U.S. resupply, which enhances deterrence through depth and resilience.²³

The Asymmetric Duel: Attrition and Adaptation

Taiwan’s integrated air defence system faces two principal challenges. First is the risk of saturation, as PLA doctrine emphasizes overwhelming defences through large volumes of drones and missile salvos intended to exhaust interceptors.²⁴ The second are non-kinetic pressures. PLA investments in cyber, electronic warfare, and data manipulation are aimed at degrading, rather than disabling, command-and-control and sensor–shooter links. Experience from Ukraine suggests that such non-kinetic operations can disrupt the effectiveness of air defence and impose friction, but have generally fallen short of paralyzing integrated systems, particularly when defenders employ redundancy, mobility, and rapid adaptation.

The Ukraine war offers lessons for the PLA as it refines drone-swarm tactics to saturate Taiwan’s defences.²⁵ As in Ukraine, tactics can be used to overcome a numerical disadvantage, including mobility, dispersal, and tactical innovation. Taiwan’s adaptation includes surface-to-air missile mobility, strategic hardening, command-and-control redundancy, and distributed teams equipped with man-portable air defence systems and other weapons to efficiently counter unsophisticated threats. During a blockade or attrition contest, the ability to sustain will be decisive, elevating NCSIST’s role in the mass production of missiles, drones, and spares from a matter of industrial necessity to one necessary for survival.²⁶

Should Taiwan survive the first strike and compel the PLA to transition to an adaptive phase of the conflict marked by a slower tempo, operational improvisation, and iterative adjustment rather than pre-planned shock operations, the possibility of a swift PLA victory is eliminated.

Conclusion: The Shield of Uncertainty

An integrated air defence system is a central enabling pillar that shapes campaigns, denies quick victory, and raises costs. It integrates domestic and foreign systems under a doctrine developed from the lessons of in-depth analysis of contemporary warfare. It is more than the capability to down missiles and aircraft. It aims to withstand the initial strike, disrupt China’s rapid decision-making in a conflict, and force any hostilities into a protracted, expensive war of attrition for Beijing.

This system serves as a multilayered complication for every stage of a potential cross-strait invasion. It denies an adversarial force the critical air superiority necessary to acquire an amphibious assault, and increases the risk of a military blockade. It also supports Taiwan’s more extensive asymmetric defence posture, which relies on dispersed, mobile defence systems. Success, in this context, is measured not by the system’s absolute performance but by its robust, sustained performance under stress and by the cognitive impacts of its existence on Chinese war planners. As such, the integrated air defence has a unique impact, increasing China’s calculative risk and introducing deterrence through the potential of a protracted, destructive war that Beijing is highly unlikely to win.

Gaurav Sen is a Senior Research Fellow at the School of International Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the author of The Peril of the Pacific: Military Balance and the Battle for Taiwan. His research interests include Indo-Pacific security, great-power competition, strategic autonomy, and maritime geopolitics.

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Featured Image: A People’s Liberation Army Air Force J-16 escorts a H-6 bomber during a routine deterrence patrol. [Credit: Japan Air Self-Defence Force]