Taiwan can learn four lessons from Iran’s war: leverage defensive geography to complicate invasion; prolong conflict to enable allied reinforcement; decentralize command to ensure resilience after decapitation strikes; and prioritize numerous, simple systems like drones over few, exquisite platforms to sustain denial operations.
Taiwan and Iran share a handful of geopolitical conditions—most obviously the need to deter a far larger and more powerful foreign aggressor.
Taiwan should—and must—learn from the United States’ ongoing aerial onslaught against Iran. Oddly, this thought experiment casts Taiwan in the role of Iran, the defender, while China plays the role of the United States, the attacker. The blue team becomes the red team, and vice versa, to foster operational and strategic imagination. Talk about acute role reversal.
Four lessons stand out to your humble scribe.
Lesson #1: Enlist the Aid of Defensive Geography
Geography matters. Iran’s principal assailant, the United States, lies thousands of miles from the combat zone. America is a resident power in the Middle East, but heavy forces bound for the Persian Gulf typically surge from bases in the homeland. Maritime forces sortieing from the East Coast of the United States have to traverse not just vast distances, but potentially embattled waterways—the Red Sea and Bab el-Mandeb Strait in particular—to gain entry to the waters and skies adjoining the Islamic Republic. Or they have to undertake the arduous roundabout voyage through the South Atlantic into the Indian Ocean.
It may not seem so considering the pounding it has taken, but Iran is actually a tremendous beneficiary of the tyranny of distance. Not so with Taiwan. In one sense, geography has cursed the island republic. It lies under the shadow of its major antagonist, China, which has armed itself with an array of weaponry to pummel the island while fending off US or allied reinforcements for a time. Nor does Beijing bother to conceal its malice toward Taipei. If the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) can recruit time as its ally, it will dramatically bolster its chances of subduing the island’s defenders. And while the United States has committed only a fraction of its armed might to Operation Epic Fury, China tends to keep its massive armed forces grouped in East Asia, near potential battlegrounds. Numbers of ships, combat aircraft, and munitions are its friend.
Of course, Taiwan enjoys sizable geographic advantages as well. The Taiwan Strait is no Strait of Hormuz, the lone artery connecting the open ocean to a resource-rich body of water enclosed by land. Still, the strait separating Taiwan from the mainland, about 81 miles wide at its narrowest point, confers geopolitical leverage on the island’s defenders. Staging an opposed amphibious landing across that wide an expanse would make the Normandy landings look like child’s play. Taiwan’s military could deploy an arsenal meant to interdict shipping in the Strait, staving off an invasion force while hampering PLA Navy efforts to combine regional fleets for action. At the same time, interdicting surface traffic would inflict pain on the Chinese merchant fleet, and in turn on the mainland’s import- and export-dependent economy.
Taiwan also benefits from mountainous, genuinely forbidding topography. Despite 50 years of colonial control, Imperial Japan never completely conquered the island after wresting it from imperial China in the 1890s. During World War II, US commanders diverted their Central Pacific offensive to Okinawa rather than incur the costs and hazards of fighting amid Taiwan’s stark terrain. Iran famously hardened nuclear and weapons sites by burying them deep underground. Similarly, the Taiwanese military should spare no effort to enlist the island’s geographic surroundings to their benefit—making a cross-strait invasion a daunting prospect for PLA invaders. If successful, they may deter.
Lesson #2: Make Time Your Friend
Taipei should attempt to prolong any cross-strait war. Tehran can hope to outlast the patience of the American government and society by imposing costs on US forces over a long period of time, weakening internal political support for the war à la Vietnam.
Of course, it’s doubtful a strategy of protraction would prove decisive vis-à-vis Beijing, considering the colossal value the Chinese Communist Party and ordinary Chinese affix to “reunifying” with Taiwan. But from a strictly military standpoint, denying Chinese forces access to the island and adjacent waters and skies would grant US and allied forces time to make their way into the war zone. If they weathered the storm from PLA access-denial weaponry, the allies would assemble superior combat power at the time and place of battle—turning back a PLA amphibious assault or breaking a blockade.
Taiwan’s defenders need to ensure time is on their side—not the PLA’s.
Lesson #3: Make Decapitation Impossible
The Taiwanese military should decentralize and disperse command-and-control arrangements and other capabilities to boost the defenders’ resilience. To all appearances, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) prepared for war by delegating authority to regional commanders to select their targets around the Gulf region—and, on occasion, beyond—and attack them without permission from above. Indeed, the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the opening hours of the conflict—while certain to have had an impact on Iran—did not lead it to suspend its militancy while seeking clarification from above. On the contrary, it appears to have increased it, prompting the regime to lash out wildly against American and allied targets across the Middle East.
In the weeks since the war began, the Iranian clerical regime has endured despite debilitating losses to senior political and military leaders from US and Israeli air strikes—yet it fights on. The logic: individuals may perish, but the regime endures.
It’s doubtful Taiwan, a liberal society, would countenance loosening civil control of combat operations to such a degree. Still, the principle is sound. The armed forces should look for ways to disperse, so that losing one segment of senior leadership does not defeat the war effort as a whole. Taipei’s goal should be to make the armed forces and society not just resilient, but anti-fragile.
Lesson #4: Many Adequate Systems Beat a Few Excellent Ones
Go small, simple, and plentiful in force design rather than big, exquisite, and few. To turn key terrain to advantage, stretch out the war, and disperse capabilities, Taipei should mount an access-denial strategy in miniature. Iran has been able to lash out with ballistic and cruise missiles and cheap aerial and surface drones along with swarms of small fast-attack craft and speedboats. Even fishing dhows could act as makeshift minelayers, should IRGC commanders decree.
Taiwan should follow the Iranian lead, deemphasizing major platforms like fighter jets and capital ships while fielding a bevy of drones and stealthy missile corvettes. It should disperse these craft not just in major harbors, but in small fishing harbors scattered around the island’s rugged periphery. Deliberately mingling military with civilian shipping would give PLA intelligence officers detection and targeting nightmares. (It would also be worth reaching out to the Ukrainian armed forces for counsel, if indeed Taipei hasn’t done so already. Ukraine’s defenders exude ingenuity on their worst day.)
It turns out there is plenty to learn from foes as well as friends.