Sam Cooper

HIMARS Test Marks Taiwan’s Move to Jungle-Hardened, Tech-Backed Defense Doctrine

The HIMARS roar that echoed off the coastal mountains of southern Taiwan this week was more than a weapons test. It was a declaration of deterrence.

From their perch at Jiupeng military base—where steep green ridges descend toward the Pacific—Taiwanese forces fired the U.S.-made rocket artillery system in a live-fire display designed to show how the island is transforming itself into a fortress of modern asymmetric warfare. The Taiwanese unit conducting the test had trained with U.S. forces in Oklahoma in 2024, and this week’s exercise marked the first time they demonstrated their proficiency with HIMARS on home soil.

The HIMARS platform—demonstrated in footage provided to The Bureau from Taiwan Plus—signals a decisive shift toward a mobile, nimble defensive force designed to face overwhelming scale. Unlike fixed missile sites or air bases—prime targets expected to be destroyed within hours of a PLA first-wave assault—truck-mounted HIMARS units can slip into position, launch a strike, and quickly vanish into Taiwan’s jungle-thick terrain and cliffside roads. These launchers are meant to hide, hit, and move—relying on camouflage, speed, and the natural topography of the island to stay alive and strike again.

This transformation had been quietly underway for years. In September 2023, The Bureau met with Taiwanese military strategists and international journalists at a closed-door roundtable in Taipei. Among them was a Ukrainian defense consultant—invited to share hard-won battlefield lessons from Kyiv’s resistance. The strategist told the group that the most crucial lesson for Taiwan was psychological: to instill in citizens and soldiers alike the will to prepare for aggression that seems impossible and illogical, before it arrives. “You must believe the worst can happen,” the Ukraine vet said.

That same week in Taipei, Taiwan’s then-Foreign Minister Joseph Wu made the case directly in an interview:
“There’s a growing consensus among the key analysts in the United States and also in Taiwan that war is not inevitable and the war is not imminent,” Wu said. “And we have been making significant investment in our own defense—not just increasing our military budget, but also engaging serious military reforms, in the sense of asymmetric strategy and asymmetric capability.”

That principle now guides Taiwan’s evolving force posture. The May 12 HIMARS test—launching precision-guided rockets into a Pacific exclusion zone—was the first public demonstration of the mobile artillery system since the U.S. delivered the first batch in late 2024. With a range of 300 kilometers, HIMARS provides not only mobility but standoff power, allowing Taiwan’s forces to strike amphibious staging areas, beachheads, and ships from hardened inland positions. Lockheed Martin engineers observed the drills, which were broadcast across Taiwanese news networks as both a military signal and psychological campaign.

The live-fire exercise also marked the debut of the Land Sword II, a domestically developed surface-to-air missile system designed to counter diverse aerial threats, including cruise missiles, aircraft, and drones. Land Sword II adds a mobile, all-weather air defense layer to Taiwan’s increasingly dense multi-domain network. By deploying it alongside HIMARS, Taiwan demonstrated its commitment to building overlapping shields—striking at invading forces while protecting its launch platforms from aerial suppression.

But these new missile systems are only the tip of the spear.

Taiwan’s military has quietly abandoned the vestiges of a Cold War posture centered on fleet battles and long-range missile parity with the mainland. Defense officials now concede that attempts to match Beijing plane-for-plane or ship-for-ship are a dead end. Instead, inspired by the “porcupine” concept outlined by retired U.S. Marines and intelligence officials, Taiwan is remaking itself into a smart, lethal archipelago fortress—one where unmanned drones, dispersed missile cells, and underground fiber-linked command posts neutralize China’s numerical advantage.

Wu, who now serves as Secretary-General of Taiwan’s National Security Council, has been one of the doctrine’s most consistent advocates. In his writings and interviews, Wu points to Ukraine’s ability to hold off a vastly superior invader through mobility, deception, and smart munitions. “We are not seeking parity. We are seeking survivability,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs. “And if we survive, we win.”

A New Arsenal of Ideas: From Silicon Valley to the Taiwan Strait

If Ukraine showed the value of agile, off-the-shelf technologies on the battlefield, Taiwan seems poised to go a step further—by integrating cutting-edge systems developed not by defense contractors, but by Silicon Valley insurgents.

Among the most closely watched innovators is Palmer Luckey, the former Oculus founder whose defense firm, Anduril Industries, is quietly revolutionizing battlefield autonomy. Through its Dive Technologies division and flagship Ghost and Bolt drone platforms, Anduril builds AI-guided aerial and underwater drones capable of swarming enemy ships, submarines, and even mines—exactly the kinds of systems Taiwan could deploy along its maritime approaches and chokepoints.

Luckey, who visited Japan and South Korea in early 2025 to brief U.S. allies on asymmetric AI warfare, has warned that in a Taiwan invasion scenario, the side with better autonomous targeting and tracking could determine victory before a single human-fired missile is launched.

“The PLA is betting big on AI,” he told Business Insider. “If Taiwan and the U.S. don’t match that, we’re done.”

Much of this strategy finds intellectual backing in The Boiling Moat, a 2024 strategy volume edited by former U.S. National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger. The book proposes a multi-layered defense of Taiwan that includes hardened ground troops, swarming drones, portable anti-ship missiles, and AI battlefield networking.

Pottinger argues that Taiwan must become “the toughest target on earth”—a phrase now common among Taiwanese officers briefing American delegations. Speaking to NPR last year, Pottinger noted that Taiwan’s survival doesn’t rest on matching China’s power, but on “convincing Beijing that the price of conquest will be far too high to bear.”