Taiwan’s Will to Fight Is Precisely the Problem

Raymond Kuo and Catherine Kish argue in War on the Rocks (“Taiwan’s Will to Fight Isn’t the Problem,” September 5, 2025) that Taiwan’s will to fight is not the problem. They cite consistent polling data showing substantial Taiwanese public support for the defense of their homeland and highlight civil society activities such as Kuma Academy being amplified by Taiwanese state media. Their intervention is important; it reflects the growing American attention to Taiwan’s social resilience. However, surveys may reflect support, but not the capacity to act on it. They cannot substitute for institutional trust, especially when responses are shaped by what people feel they are supposed to say.

The truth is, we will not know whether Taiwan’s will to fight holds until it is measured against the reality of conflict. Training for cameras may shape perception, but it cannot stand in for the difficult work of civil-military cohesion. State-curated narratives – that the opposition obstructs defense preparedness by paralyzing politics – cannot replace political inclusion, as the August 1 editorial of Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun called upon, which requires treating democratic opposition as a partner in deterrence and not as a threat to be managed.

When the opposition is labeled as “impurity” by the sitting president, its criticism – in Kuo and Kish’s words – framed as “polarization,” and its legitimate, democratic representation attemptedly deprived through recall campaigns or moral delegitimization, it undermines the very societal cohesion Taiwan’s presidential strategy claims to build. Kuo and Kish are absolutely right to point out that Taiwan’s whole-of-resilience budget, recently passed without objection in the Legislative Yuan (Taiwan’s unicameral legislature), is an indispensable component to Taiwan’s national defense. But Taiwan’s whole-of-society resilience, if it is to mean anything, must include those who think differently, legislate independently – the whole society.

Taiwan’s will to fight does not exist in a vacuum. It depends on whether citizens feel they are truly part of the system they are being asked to defend. When whole-of-society resilience does not include the whole society, it fractures the very cohesion that deterrence requires. So – yes, Taiwan’s will to fight is precisely the problem, not because it is absent, but because we do not actually know how much there is and if it is enough, and because contentious politics continues to erode it.

The Unmeasurable Variable

Public opinion data is often cited as evidence of national readiness, but the gap between professed intent and actual behavior complicates that assumption. Even sophisticated survey instruments struggle to overcome a basic challenge: when people are asked whether they would fight for their country, many respond with what they believe is expected of them. This social desirability bias does not disappear just because a survey is anonymous. It can become internalized, shaping instinctive responses that reflect civic ideals more than personal conviction. Scholars have tried to narrow this gap through experimental methods like list-based techniques to quantify hidden reluctance, but they still rely on assumptions about what people are concealing and why. And even these approaches can underestimate how much political or cultural pressure colors opinion under heightened tension. Those who speak most loudly of resistance are not always the ones who stay to fight. And yet, too much weight is still placed on opinion polls to assess Taiwan’s will to fight, as if a survey answer today can predict who will stay when the stakes are real.

The same dynamic applies to polling on defense spending. When asked if Taiwan should increase its defense budget, many will say yes – not necessarily because they have weighed the trade-offs, but because it feels like the correct, even virtuous, answer. Popular support for spending more on defense may reflect national anxiety or moral signaling, but it does not tell us how much sacrifice people are actually prepared to make, or under what conditions that support would erode.

This raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: if not the will to fight, what exactly are these surveys measuring? We do not know yet. That uncertainty should caution against treating polling as a proxy for preparedness, especially when institutional trust and political inclusion – the real enablers of collective action – remain so contested. There is no reliable formula to predict who will resist and who will retreat. That is precisely why Taiwan’s will to fight remains a critical and unsettled variable.

Voting with Their Feet

Surveys may reflect support, but they do not reveal capacity. The will to fight is not a fixed quantity. It must be cultivated, reinforced, and sustained through real institutional trust. One way to gauge that trust is to ask: who signs up, and who stays? If public willingness to serve is the truest measure of readiness, then Taiwan’s personnel shortfalls should give us pause. Despite growing security threats and expanded budgets, the armed forces remain strained by low recruitment and declining retention.

Since 2020, the military’s manning rate has fallen from 88.57 percent to 78.6 percent in 2024. That figure falls well below the standard 85 percent threshold, beneath which units are often assessed as no longer able to sustain full operational capacity. When manning dips, even routine functions like leave rotations and training cycles become harder to maintain. Readiness suffers.

Yet, in June 2025, the Legislative Yuan passed amendments to the Armed Forces Pay Act to address this challenge. The amended law introduced a NT$30,000 monthly bonus for new enlistees and a frontline allowance to incentivize service in combat formations. Wellington Koo, Minister of National Defense, welcomed the measure, and the early signs were encouraging. For the military academies’ class of 2029, the seven schools originally planned to admit 1,476 students but received 4,008 applications. By June 30, 1,687 students had reported for matriculation. Both applications and matriculations were the highest in five years, and for the first time in five years all seven institutions – the Army, Navy, and Air Force academies, the Science and Technology Academy, the Management College, the Political Warfare College, and the National Defense Medical Center – filled their quotas. Analysts credited the turnaround to the pay raise.

Then the Executive Yuan refused to fund it. Citing “constitutional convention,” the administration declined to implement the legislature’s compensation package and instructed the services to pull recruitment materials that had promoted the raise.

Taiwan cannot claim to be strengthening its will to fight while reversing the very reforms that encouraged people to serve. People still vote with their feet. And too often, they are walking away.

What Sustains Taiwan’s Will to Fight and How the U.S. Can Help

Taiwan’s will to fight cannot be cultivated through abstract concepts alone. It requires tangible, institutional reinforcement across political, social, and material domains. This means rethinking what whole-of-society resilience really demands – and where the current strategy falls short.

First, political inclusion. Three weeks ago, American Institute in Taiwan Director Ray Greene hosted the first U.S. security briefing with Taiwan’s opposition lawmakers. That shift was long overdue. The United States cannot afford to treat Taiwan’s political opposition as peripheral when their support is essential to passing defense budgets and shaping deterrence posture. Engagement must extend beyond courtesy meetings. U.S. defense initiatives in Washington and the Indo-Pacific – from tabletop exercises, whole-of-society resilience workshops, to track-1.5 dialogues – should include Taiwan’s opposition legislators, party headquarters, and local governments. Whole-of-society cannot be achieved top-down. It must be built laterally, across Taiwan’s democratic institutions, especially those outside the executive branch.

Second, energy security. Resilience collapses without power. If the lights go out, public morale and military readiness degrade quickly within 48 to 72 hours. Taiwan’s survival quite literally depends on whether or not it can endure the first several days alone. The current government has resisted nuclear power despite warnings about energy vulnerability. Yet Taiwan already imports U.S.-designed reactors from General Electric. Taiwan’s readoption of nuclear power will be a win-win for both the U.S. and Taiwan and therefore there is no strategic logic to any opposition. U.S. partners should also continue encouraging Taiwan to diversify its energy sources, including by revitalizing nuclear generation and stabilizing and accelerating delivery of U.S. liquified natural gas – ideally through dedicated, American-flagged vessels. Recent steps like the introduction of Taiwan Energy Security and Anti-Embargo Act of 2025 by Senate Foreign Relations Committee members Pete Ricketts and Chris Coons are a good start, but resilience will remain brittle unless power stability is made a strategic priority.

Third, manpower sustainment. Taiwan’s defense budget is structured around three main pillars: personnel sustainment, investment and procurement (including research and development), and operations and maintenance (O&M) – the funding needed to operate, fuel, and repair equipment once it is acquired. Defense analysts generally argue that investment and O&M should remain close to a 1:1 ratio, to ensure that newly purchased systems come with the trained personnel, logistics capacity, and maintenance support required to use them. But that ratio has been slipping. In FY 2023, Taiwan’s investment-to-O&M ratio stood at 1.58:1. In FY 2024 it climbed to 1.72:1, and it is projected to reach 1.75:1 in FY 2026 – the highest yet. Dr. Chieh Chung of Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research has warned that at this rate, there may not be enough funding to maintain core systems at combat-ready levels.

The implications are clear. No system matters if it cannot be operated, fueled, or sustained. If Washington wants a Taiwan that can actually fight and endure, it should help ensure balance across the budget’s three pillars. That means sustaining pay raises and frontline incentives, even when politically inconvenient. It also means investing in logistics, spares, and training pipelines to make new systems combat-ready. Taiwan’s public increasingly supports not only weapons procurement, but also better pay and better upkeep. U.S. partners should help turn that support into a more sustainable force.