Defence: “porcupine strategy”
By Richard North - December 11, 2025
I have been steadily ploughing through Captain S W Roskill’s War at Sea, the official account of the Royal Navy’s part in the Second World War, published in three volumes (with the third volume in two parts), running to well over 2,000 pages.
One might think that a series first published in 1956 might have little relevance to our contemporary trials and tribulations and, in particular, the two great preoccupations of our age – the potential for a Russian land attack in mainland Europe and, on the other side of the world, the much-feared Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
Whether either is likely to happen is a hotly contested subject, but it serves some to have us obsessing over these possibilities, thus keeping our minds off the deteriorating political situation at home.
What brings the Taiwan situation to mind – one that I haven’t discussed on this blog so far – is an article in the Telegraph which headlines: “China would destroy US military in fight over Taiwan, top secret document warns”, with the sub-head telling us: “Beijing’s hypersonic missiles ‘could sink US aircraft carriers within minutes’”.
This is according to a highly classified “Overmatch Brief” produced by the Pentagon, covered more fully in the New York Times which has it that in wargames rehearsing an invasion of Taiwan, the US “lose every time”, with a prediction that China’s hypersonic missiles could destroy the US Navy’s aircraft carriers “within minutes”.
However, we told, the assessment shows something more worrying than the potential outcome of a war over Taiwan. It shows the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons as adversaries field cheap, technologically advanced ones. And it traces a decades-long decline in America’s ability to win a long war with a major power.
War games can be wrong, the NYT says: analysts sometimes overstate adversaries’ abilities. Yet, it says, this larger point should not be ignored. Nearly four decades after victory in the Cold War, the US military is ill prepared for today’s global threats and revolutionary technologies.
The paper continues with its theme, asserting that the situation presents “an ancient and familiar pattern.” Despite ample warnings, it says, military and political leaders trained in one set of assumptions, tactics and weapons fail to adapt to change.
Whether it was the French army in 1940, stuck behind its defensive Maginot Line, or Russian armoured formations in Ukraine in 2022, decimated by Javelin missiles, the result is devastating for the side that will not discard old concepts, adopt new weapons or rethink its way of war.
To my mind, it is not so much a question of adopting new weapons – although new technologies across the board, from sensors, to communications equipment and weapons all have a role. The key issue – which has been brought home so vividly from the Ukraine experience – is that Western armed forces (and those that they support) need to re-think their “way of war”.
It is here that Captain S W Roskill’s account of a war eighty years ago might have particular relevance, in particular his account of the early days of the war when the threat from Nazi U-Boats had to be confronted.
Although the convoy system to protect merchant shipping had been successfully implemented in the First World War, there were hawks in the Admiralty who rejected the idea of this defensive strategy, preferring – in the best traditions of the Navy – a more aggressive, offensive role for the warships.
Instead of passively escorting the merchant ships, it was argued, anti-submarine vessels should form independent flotillas and hunt down the U-Boats and destroy them before they were able to harm their prey.
Fortunately, sense prevailed in the Royal Navy very quickly and the convoy system was reintroduced, based on the successful counter-argument that sailing the ships in an organised group, flanked by escorts, had, in fact, its offensive element, enticing U-Boats to attack, whence they could be detected and destroyed.
Experience through the war showed unequivocally that convoy escorts were by far the most prolific killers of submarines. Sadly, after Pearl Harbour in 1941, the US Navy was slow to accept this lesson, resulting in terrible losses of shipping in the Western Atlantic, before the convoy system was adopted there.
The point here is that the defensive/offensive strategy can be far more effective in the wider context and, with a bit of imagination, could apply to Taiwan, where the wargaming consistently points to the combined US and Taiwanese forces being unable to prevent a determined invasion, with the defensive naval forces taking huge losses.
Rather than attempting to intercept the landing armada, therefore, the defences would be better off keeping their own seaborne assets out of harm’s war, and using stand-off weapons to attrit the invading forces, accepting that such action is unlikely to prevent the assault.
It is a given, though, with seaborne landings that establishing the beachhead is only the first stage; the harder, more resource-intensive phase is the exploitation which continues until the strategic objectives have been reached.
And here, despite the concerns over US inadequacies, it seems that the Taiwanese are ahead of the game and are planning to emulate the Ukrainian defensive posture in Donbass by relying on the island’s towns and cities as defensive bastions to soak up attacking Chinese forces, in a form of asymmetric warfare.
This stratagem has a formal identity as the “Overall Defence Concept” (ODC), which was adopted in 2021 and continuously refined under President Lai Ching-te. It explicitly incorporates urban warfare as a core component of what is known as its asymmetric “porcupine strategy”.
The goal, as stated, is not to hold cities indefinitely (as in Stalingrad-style attrition), but to use them as deliberate force-multiplication zones that impose catastrophic costs on a PLA amphibious/assault force that is already logistically strained after crossing the Taiwan Strait.
Cities and towns have been designated as the final decisive terrain after beachheads and coastal kill zones are lost, the plan being to turn built-up areas into “defence in depth” bastions. Under such conditions, the effects of mass are lost and the effects of many of the weapons and systems are reduced.
By this means, the mechanized/airmobile forces of the PLA are to be forced into costly, slow, street-by-street fighting, buying 2–6 weeks of additional time for US-Japanese intervention.
Although outnumbered by the PLA, Taiwan can mobilise 1.6 million reserve personnel, all of whom have had military training, to fight alongside the 170,000 regular forces. Modelled partly on Ukraine’s Territorial Defence force, its explicit mission is urban defence in secondary cities and towns.
Taipei, Kaohsiung, Taichung, and Taoyuan are priority “core defence zones”, the medium-sized cities (Hsinchu, Chiayi, Tainan, Keelung, etc.) are designated “regional strongholds” and even the smaller towns along major highways (e.g., Toufen, Zhunan, Pingtung) are pre-surveyed for barricades, demolition sites, and sniper/anti-tank ambush points.
In short, Taiwan is well-prepared for a defensive war and can inflict significant damage on an invading force. A bloody urban battle in Taipei or around Taipei would shatter the PLA’s hope for a quick 7–14 day decapitation strike.
In terms of deterrent, it forces China to choose between genocidal-level destruction (losing the propaganda war) or prolonged siege (giving allies time to intervene)
And what is good for Taiwan must be equally good for Western Europe, where Ukraine is already proving the “porcupine Strategy”. Rather than investing huge amounts in shiny green toys – ready to fight a huge, offensive battle of manoeuvre, suffering huge losses, the western powers would do well to fortify their cities, training their soldiers to fight in them, thereby neutralising any advantages the Russians might have in manpower and scale of equipment.
Both in Taiwan and in Europe, this compensates for the Pentagon’s overreliance on expensive, vulnerable weapons, a disease which is just as prevalent this side of the Atlantic, and makes defence a viable and affordable proposition.
The biggest handicap we have is narrowness of vision and the inability to devise a “way of war” suited to the real world, instead of chasing after endless “toys for boys” equipment projects that serve only to line defence contractor’s pockets and massage the vanity of politicians.
