The US is gearing up to send Taiwan its largest-ever security package, officials say, as China threat grows
Taiwanese soldiers during a live ammunition training in Taichung, Taiwan, on August 8, 2024.
The US is gearing up to send Taiwan its largest-ever security package, multiple congressional aides and a US official told Defense News.
The package, which the Pentagon has already approved, will pay for air defenses, multi-domain awareness, anti-armor weaponry, training, military stockpiles, and drones, one official said.
Two of the sources told the outlet that President Joe Biden is expected to sign the $567 million package before the fiscal year expires later this month.
It would nearly double the amount the US sent in a previous $345 million package last year.
According to the report, the Biden administration will use its fastest available approach to delivering the aid: shipping its own stockpiles.
Concerns about a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan have grown since Phil Davidson, then the US Indo-Pacific commander, said in 2021 that China may invade Taiwan by 2027.
Since then, military experts and former defense officials have made similar assessments.
Most say signs — like China’s rapid modernization of its armed forces over the past two decades and drills around Taiwan — point to Chinese military action to seize the island by force, possibly in just a few years.
China’s growing military activity
Speaking to reporters last week, Taiwan’s defense minister said it will become harder to spot early signs of a Chinese attack due to its growing military activity around the country.
“The scale of [China’s military] activity is getting larger and larger, and so it is harder to discern when they might be shifting from training to a large exercise, and from an exercise to war,” Wellington Koo said, per the Financial Times.
He added that Taiwan’s response time to an emergency “cannot be as long as we would have imagined in the past.”
According to daily updates shared by Taiwan’s defense ministry, China’s aircraft, vessels, and ships now operate around Taiwan almost daily, sometimes crossing the median line in the Taiwan Strait and causing Taiwan to scramble its planes.
Deterring China
For decades, the US has adopted “strategic ambiguity” toward Taiwan, positioning itself as the island’s most steadfast ally, while declining to explicitly say whether it would come to Taiwan’s aid if China attacked.
However, over the last few years, the mood in Washington, DC, has shifted toward greater hawkishness, Graeme Thompson, an analyst with the Eurasia Group, told B-17 last November.
President Joe Biden has repeatedly suggested the US would respond militarily if China attacked Taiwan.
According to an August 2024 report by the Congressional Research Service, Taiwan is one of the largest purchasers of US defense equipment.
Meanwhile, the Financial Times reported that SEAL Team 6 — which took out Osama bin Laden in 2011 — has spent more than a year planning and training at its Dam Neck base in Virginia for a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Three retired Navy officers told B-17 last week that the unit may be preparing Taiwanese forces for reconnaissance operations and missions to repel a Chinese invasion.
