Ten lessons. After Afghanistan, American expeditionary doctrine has changed. Taipei's procurement debate has not caught up. It needs to.
The Iran campaign is the clearest demonstration since 2003 of how the U.S. now prefers to fight: standoff, multi-domain, with a small forward footprint and a heavy reliance on allied basing and intelligence fusion. Taipei's procurement debate still reads as if the operative model were 2003 Iraq.
Ten lessons follow. Among them: munitions stockpiles matter more than platforms; survivable C2 matters more than survivable airframes; pre-war intelligence integration matters more than any single weapons buy. The cross-Strait scenario differs from Iran in geography, but the doctrinal direction of travel is the same.
The column closes with the procurement implications — which line items deserve to grow, which deserve to be defended at current levels, and which deserve to be reconsidered.
Originally published in China Times · 中國時報. Reproduced here with the author's permission. For inquiries, contact SouthRock Group.