Taiwan's military ran live-fire drills for attack drones this week, five days before Xi Jinping is due at the White House on September 24. The timing is the message. Taipei is not staging a defense-budget photo op for the legislature; it is testing the exact capability, drone strike coordination, that its own May budget cuts gutted before restoring hardware money to conventional jets in August. The drills come as Taiwan tracked 20 Chinese warplanes and 14 ships around the island this week, part of a pattern the island's defense ministry logged at 28 aircraft and nine vessels in a single day on September 18.

Beijing has not yet decided whether the summit survives the $14 billion Taiwan arms sale Washington has teed up, and Taipei's drone drills are not a negotiating chip for that meeting. They are a rehearsal for the scenario that follows any summit outcome: contact with PLA aircraft that no longer treats the median line as a boundary. A Beijing that cancels Xi's visit over the arms sale still has to explain, at home, why a coast guard confrontation with the Philippines and a warplane count over Taiwan both intensified in the same month it was managing Washington. The drills do not wait for that explanation.