Sea drone makers swarm Taiwan as NT$240B defence bill passes

Sea drones churned up a marina in southern Taiwan on Nov 2 as manufacturers from Taiwan, the US and Singapore pitched their uncrewed vessels to government officials at a yacht resort in Tainan. Silver-hulled USVs several metres long showed off their speed and agility, while underwater vehicles built to inspect the seabed hovered beneath the surface, AFP reported.

The sales pitch lands on fertile ground. Taiwan's Parliament recently passed a NT$240 billion (S$9.4 billion) drone defence Bill, and more spending is expected to clear in November. The military has said it wants more than 1,400 coastal surveillance and reconnaissance drones, over 200,000 coastal attack drones and 1,320 one-way attack uncrewed surface vessels.

That shopping list has turned the island into a magnet for the industry. Cathy Fang, a policy analyst at the government-backed Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology, said Taiwan has the largest procurement for USVs in the world right now — and that is why the companies all came. Taiwan wants to become an Asian hub for drone production free of Chinese components, leaning on its AI and semiconductor muscle.

Foreign firms are already signing deals. Florida-based Maritime Tactical Systems announced that Taiwan's coast guard will buy 25 of its USVs, built in both the US and Taiwan. Chief growth officer Seamus Flatley said the company is investing in Taiwan, and that fleets of small USVs running different missions take a load off the coast guard and Navy. Virginia's STR8 Industries, whose chief executive Phil Ho said the drones let Taiwan project scalable force, was also on hand, alongside Taiwan's Thunder Tiger and its SeaShark 600.

Price is the pitch. Depending on the model, a sea drone runs from thousands to millions of US dollars and takes weeks or months to build — far cheaper and faster than a warship or submarine. Bryce Barros, a former US Senate national security adviser now at the Global Taiwan Institute, called them a relatively low-cost game changer that complicates Chinese military operations, while analyst Su Tzu-yun of the Institute for National Defense and Security Research said they help offset Taiwan's manpower shortage from its falling birth rate.

Demand isn't only coming from the Taiwan Strait. Grace Chia, chief executive of Singapore underwater vehicle maker BeeX, said global interest in UUVs has soared since the Middle East war began and Iran claimed control of the Strait of Hormuz, as buyers realise a simple mine can knock out an entire channel. Analysts still flag hurdles: tying different drone types into one military, getting the systems to talk to each other, and operating without Elon Musk's Starlink satellites. Barros said satellite comms matter less for near-shore missions inside Taiwan's 12-nautical-mile zone.