It can fly 267 kilometers per hour and has advanced radar and torpedoes specifically designed to find and destroy submarines.

In 2015, the government of Taiwan asked to purchase 12 of them from the United States.

Taiwan wanted these helicopters in order to defend themselves against a potential invasion from China, which has a massive submarine fleet.

The U.S. has for decades sold Taiwan a huge variety of its weapons, so this was a routine request.

But in 2022, the deal suddenly collapsed.

Reporting revealed that the U.S. was actually not responding to its request and even pushing

Taiwan to not buy them.

And it's because the U.S. has become very concerned that Taiwan's strategy for defending itself from an invasion has some major flaws.

I think would have been the first time that the United States formally denied a Taiwanese request for something.

The consensus is Taiwan needs to do much more to show that it is addressing this with urgency.

So what is Taiwan's plan to fight off a Chinese invasion?

And why is the U.S. trying to change it?

The conflict between China and Taiwan started almost a century ago.

In 1927, Chinese communists loyal to Mao Zedong began fighting against the nationalist government ruled by Chiang Kai-shek and his allies.

More than 6 million people died in the ensuing civil war.

In 1949, the communist army won, and the nationalists fled to Taiwan, just 130 kilometers offshore.

On the mainland, the communists established the People's Republic of China, which, for the sake of clarity, we'll call China, while the nationalists set up their own authoritarian regime called the Republic of China, which we'll call Taiwan.

But the war never ended, with each side continuing to claim that they were the legitimate government of both Taiwan and the mainland, and threatening, eventually, to reunify with the other.

The United States originally sided with the nationalists in 1954, then signed a mutual defense pact with them, promising to defend Taiwan if China invaded.

It then positioned American troops and weapons on the island.

But about 20 years later, the U.S. wanted to improve its relationship with China.

So in 1979, it formally recognized it as the country's legitimate government.

It then pulled its troops out of Taiwan, and ended its official promise to defend it.

In its place, the U.S. passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which was a promise to maintain trade and cultural relations with Taiwan, but crucially not a promise to defend the island in the event of a Chinese attack.

It leaves ambiguous whether the United States would actually intervene directly on Taiwan's behalf.

David Sachs is a fellow for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Because of U.S. ambiguity, Taiwan assumes that the United States will not come to its defense.

Instead, the law promises that the U.S. will sell Taiwan all the weapons it needs to defend itself.

So in the 80s and 90s, Taiwan started submitting requests to buy weapons, and the U.S. government approved them.

It bought fighter jets, tanks, attack helicopters, missiles, and even ships.

These were some of the most advanced and expensive weapons that the U.S. had to offer.

These M60 tanks cost more than a million dollars each, F-16 fighter jets cost about 40 million dollars each, and these ships cost upwards of 300 million dollars.

But the U.S. and Taiwan both agreed that these weapons gave Taiwan an advantage against China's likely invasion strategy.

At the time, China would likely begin its invasion by sending its troops across the strait in ships.

But while it had millions more soldiers than Taiwan, it had relatively few advanced weapons to protect them.

So as they crossed the strait, Taiwan's jets, ships, and missiles could easily attack them.

Any Chinese troops that made it across would quickly run into Taiwan's defenses, including its tanks.

As Taiwan stalled China, its second advantage, the United States, could decide to intervene and move in its military, giving Taiwan a high chance of successfully repelling a Chinese invasion.

The key variable here when we're thinking about U.S. intervention on Taiwan's behalf is time.

How long it can withstand a PRC attack.

So through the 1990s, Taiwan kept spending its money on U.S.-made aircraft, tanks, and ships in preparation for that scenario.

But across the strait, China was changing its strategy, and fast.

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And now let's get back to China and the biggest military buildup in modern history.

In 1995, China fired six missiles into the sea surrounding Taiwan to protest the rise of a new Taiwanese leader.

Li Teng-hue would become Taiwan's first popularly elected president, and he wanted to move Taiwan away from any reunification with the mainland, something China disapproved of.

By firing these missiles, China was demonstrating its commitment to reunification and its willingness to use its military to achieve it.

Over the previous decades, China had dramatically grown its economy.

Then beginning in the 1990s, it poured a lot of that money into its military, outspending

Taiwan by billions.

China developed its own modern tanks, fighter jets, submarines, helicopters, battleships and ballistic missiles in order to match Taiwan's American-made weaponry.

Now we see China fielding advanced fourth and even fifth generation fighters.

They're just as advanced as the F-16s Taiwan has.

We've also seen China really ramp up its submarine capacity, ballistic missiles.

And so it has been focused above all else on preparing for Taiwan.

By 2013, the Taiwanese Ministry of Defense estimated that China's military had three times as many helicopters, more than four times as many battleships, eight times as many fighter jets, 10 times as many tanks, more than 15 times as many submarines and an overwhelming number of ballistic missiles that could reach Taiwan.

These weapons gave China a better chance of successfully invading by negating both of

Taiwan's advantages.

Instead of sending its troops over first, China could use its missiles to bombard Taiwan's airfields and ports, easy targets that would effectively eliminate Taiwan's Air Force and Navy.

Next, its ships and submarines could protect its troops as they crossed the strait.

Then its aircraft and tanks could help them capture the island, possibly fast enough to discourage the U.S. from intervening.

That would leave Taiwan with a very low chance of success.

But if the U.S. did intervene, China could use its own advanced aircraft, ships, subs and missiles to block its path, creating a scenario that either side could win.

A lot of the capabilities that China has developed make it much more difficult for Taiwan to leverage those advanced weapons.

Taiwan needed a new strategy that didn't rely so heavily on these advanced weapons.

In 2008, an American military expert named William Murray proposed a strategy that did just that, and even gave it a name.

The slow, but sure-footed porcupine is world-renowned for one thing, its quills.

The porcupine strategy argues that instead of buying a few big, expensive weapons, Taiwan should instead buy lots and lots of small, mobile, and inexpensive ones.

Porcupine-style weapons include these portable anti-aircraft missiles called stingers, anti-ship weapons called harpoons, as well as drones and mines.

For the cost of an F-16 fighter jet, Taiwan could buy almost six harpoon systems, or 135 stingers.

By purchasing large quantities of these weapons, Taiwan could then cover itself with them, like a porcupine's quills.

The whole notion of a porcupine strategy is basically that Taiwan becomes too difficult to swallow, so to speak.

You put enough question marks in the PLA leadership that they're not sure that they can achieve their objectives.

The young male warns the coyote to back off, chattering his teeth and raising his quills.

Or if they do, the cost will be too great.

If China begins the invasion, its missiles still could destroy Taiwan's planes and ships.

But these smaller weapons are harder targets to hit.

So when China sends over its main invasion force, it's slowed down by Taiwan's mines in the water.

Taiwan's troops can then use stinger missiles to destroy China's aircraft, and harpoons to destroy its ships.

While these weapons don't give Taiwan the ability to defeat China on its own, they could likely buy it enough time to allow the U.S. to decide to come help, which would give it a higher chance of success.

Rather than try to match China ship for ship, plane for plane, all it does is need to prevent a successful invasion of Taiwan.

Without heeding the warning, the coyote walks into a well-timed left hook.

Switching to a porcupine strategy would require a massive shift for Taiwan's military.

But beginning in the 2010s, U.S. officials began urging Taiwan to buy weapons that fit the porcupine strategy.

And Taiwan seemed to mostly agree.

In 2015, it purchased 250 stingers, and about 800 other kinds of missiles, all smaller, more agile weapons.

By 2020, it purchased hundreds more, plus drones and radar systems.

But at the same time, it was continuing to buy advanced weapons, like fighter jets and tanks, and even building its own modern battleships and submarines.

And in 2022, thousands of miles away, Russia invaded its much smaller neighbor, Ukraine.

Ukraine's military is holding its ground against the Russian onslaught, as a fourth night of heavy fighting is underway.

Ukraine has been able to fight back the Russian invasion, largely thanks to porcupine-style weapons supplied by the U.S. and its Western allies.

Taiwan hoped in the sense that, on paper, Russia was a far superior military force, but that didn't necessarily translate on the battlefield.

And that a lot of these weapons that Taiwan has purchased, like stingers and javelins and HIMARS, made a big difference.

In 2022, Taiwan got U.S. approval to buy more porcupine-style weapons, and it ramped up its own production of missiles.

But when it also asked to buy advanced MH-60R submarine-hunting helicopters for reportedly $1.2 billion, the U.S. said no.

Because they didn't fit the porcupine strategy.

I think that there is an urgency in the United States, and that has been accelerated by the war in Ukraine.

Taiwan's defense budget is not as high as we think it should be, and this money could be better used to buy things like javelins, stingers, harpoons.

The U.S. is currently Taiwan's only source of weapons, meaning it can pressure Taiwan into buying what it wants.

The problem is that in Taiwan, some leaders believe they still need these more advanced weapons to counter China's increasingly aggressive behavior that falls short of a full-scale invasion.

It needs jets to meet the increasing number of Chinese jets that fly close to the island.

And it needs ships to fight the Chinese navy if it ever tries to form a blockade.

Most importantly, though, some in Taiwan argue that it needs advanced weapons because if

China does invade, the porcupine strategy only slows it down.

Taiwan can't win unless the U.S. intervenes, something that the U.S. still hasn't promised to do.

It has to assume the worst-case scenario, and therefore it is spending money on military capabilities to defend the island alone.

That might not have been taken into consideration when the decision to block that sale was made.

So unless the U.S. promises to help, Taiwan will continue to ask for weapons it believes it needs to defend their island.

And the U.S. will continue to push back.

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