Taiwan Buys The Jets, Not The Drones
A Budget, Not A Fleet
Taiwan's Cabinet approved a record NT$1.12 trillion defense budget for 2027 on August 20, an 18 percent increase that would push military spending above NT$1 trillion and past 3 percent of GDP for the first time. President Lai Ching-te has pledged to reach 5 percent of GDP by 2030, and this budget is the first large step toward that number. The timing is not incidental. A US Navy P-8A Poseidon transited the Taiwan Strait in international airspace on August 21, one day after the budget cleared the Cabinet, ahead of a Xi-Trump meeting expected next month. Three days earlier, the first two of Taiwan's 66 F-16V Block 70 fighters departed a Lockheed Martin plant in Greenville, South Carolina, the opening delivery of an US$8.2 billion contract signed in 2019 and delayed for years by production bottlenecks. Those jets are the kind of hardware a budget headline photographs well: a runway, a tail number, a delivery date Washington can point to. The NT$1.12 trillion topline grows in that same direction, conventional and US-sourced. What it does not do, and what nobody in Taipei is currently promising it will do, is undo a decision the Legislative Yuan made three months earlier.
The Drones Left Behind
On May 8, 2026, the Legislative Yuan, where the KMT and the Taiwan People's Party hold a working majority over President Lai's Democratic Progressive Party, cut Taiwan's special defense budget from a proposed US$40 billion to US$25 billion, a 37.5 percent reduction. The cut eliminated funding for more than 200,000 domestically produced drones, loitering munitions, ISR systems, the indigenous Strong Bow anti-ballistic missile program, and a US$2 billion joint Taiwan-US drone research program, according to the Jamestown Foundation's reading of the bill. Those drones were not an abstraction on a spreadsheet. They were contracts sitting with Taiwan's own defense manufacturers, and hardware the soldiers defending the strait would operate in an actual invasion. What survived the cut was concentrated in US weapons purchases. The ruling DPP called the result a regret and warned publicly of a resulting gap in Taiwan's defenses. The pattern is not that Taipei's opposition opposes drones. It funds the line the public is watching and cuts the one negotiated in a special appropriations vote nobody outside the defense committee reads.
The NT$1.12 trillion figure is a Cabinet proposal, not a passed law; it goes to the same Legislative Yuan that gutted the special defense budget in May. Whether the opposition treats this general budget like the annual drone line it restored under public attention, or like the special appropriations it cut in committee, decides whether 3 percent of GDP funds an invasion deterrent or a shopping list. Watch the committee markup, not the headline number.
Sources
- Taiwan News -- record NT$1.12 trillion 2027 defense budget details (taiwannews.com.tw)
- Washington Post -- record $35B defense budget as China pressure grows (washingtonpost.com)
- Jamestown Foundation -- special defense budget passed with 37.5% cuts, drone programs eliminated (jamestown.org)
- Focus Taiwan -- DPP regrets defense budget cuts, warns of capability gap (focustaiwan.tw)
- Nikkei Asia (Reuters) -- US Navy aircraft transits Taiwan Strait before planned Xi-Trump meeting (asia.nikkei.com)
- Zona Militar -- first F-16V Block 70 jets depart US for Taiwan (zona-militar.com)