Keynote Speech at Taiwan Security Dialogue
Jedidiah P. Royal, former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of War for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs

Good day, colleagues. I am delighted to be here in Taipei with you. As our conference topic indicates, it matters when we gather and candidly confront the challenges we face, refine our convictions, and advance our work to deter and defend if necessary. I am honored to be given this opportunity to address you, and I want to thank the organizers at INDSR. I have had the pleasure of working with Alex Po over the past several years, and I remain grateful for his collegiality and his contagious enthusiasm.

There are two clocks ticking in this region. The threat clock has been and remains a subject of great debate amongst China watchers around the world. We all have heard Xi Jinping in his own words discuss intentions connected to timelines in 2027, 2035, and 2049. We have seen and continue to see the manifestations of his direction to the People's Liberation Army. Threatening circumnavigations, live fires, entry within 24 nautical miles of Taiwan's mainland, and rhetoric designed to intimidate and coerce. While President Xi's expressions related to these dates and the associated military activity do not make conflict inevitable, nor do they ultimately constrain future decision-making in Beijing, I am confident that a clear policy trajectory has been set, and the instruments of national power in China are working tirelessly to implement the direction and gain strategic advantage over neighbors, peers, and ultimately the international system as it currently operates. Having spent my last four years in government responsible for defense policy in the Indo-Pacific region, I take President Xi seriously. And I take the threat clock seriously. It is ticking.

But it isn't the only one. There is a second clock ticking, which is the delivery clock. As one threat clock ticks towards danger, a second delivery clock ticks towards deterrence and stability. In fact, where the threat clock is taking away time, the delivery clock buys time back. It pushes back that worst day scenario and drives down risk. This second clock is one that we have the ability to accelerate, to bend time in the direction of our combined interests. But we must move with focus and energy. We have the opportunity to do exactly that, but it will take more than we have given to date. Colleagues, I do not believe we are on track. There is much more to be done, specifically in four critical areas.

First, and most urgently, Taiwan must deliver a budget and a plan sufficient to swiftly accelerate domestic drone production. Quite frankly, when I was still serving at the Pentagon 12 months ago, I thought this would have been done well ahead of where we are today. The recent announcement of a NT240 billion drone budget is welcome, but below the expectations of many like me. This budget announcement was a single base hit, not a home run. The greatest chance for deterrence will center on the availability of reliable, networked, and responsive unmanned systems and the command and control layer that lies behind them. I want to be clear that unmanned systems alone are not sufficient to deter and defend if necessary. But please know that traditional conventional systems currently in inventory and slated for delivery will be insufficient over time as the PLA pours investments into increasingly sophisticated and smart technologies that will expand their arsenal in range, speed, and lethality.

As I have watched the internal politics surrounding this debate, I have felt a sense of regret for the time and the opportunity lost. Because the reality is that Taiwan can be a major supplier of high quality drones in all domains supported by a non-red supply chain. I believe that Taiwan is on its way to do this, but an inability to quickly agree on a robust budget and implementation plan has already diminished that opportunity and given others greater opportunity to move forward with competing efforts. I strongly encourage the Legislative Yuan to DELIVER on a more substantial domestic drone effort for defense, and a more substantial defense budget across the board. Greater defense spending focused on critical systems literally buys time.

Second, Taiwan must continue to DELIVER on operational readiness and whole of society resilience. And here I commend Taiwan for the progress that has been made over the past 5 years. Just look at the recent Han Kuang exercise and the accompanying Urban Resilience exercise. The advancements in developing more realistic scenarios, new operational concepts, greater command authority at lower levels, and use of new and emerging technologies to support conventional defense is real and powerful. Successive administrations under President Tsai and President Lai have yielded a more capable Taiwan military focused on a strategy of denial. Without Taiwan's commitment to make difficult choices that have led to this critical adaptation, I am confident that Taiwan would be further isolated, further pressured, and faced with fewer options to create its own future on its own terms.

There remains work to be done, of course, as all countries implicated in the pursuit of stability in the Indo-Pacific has more to do. Here in Taiwan, increased access to ranges, decreased regulatory requirements on mobilization and training exercises, greater integration among the armed services, and enhanced information throughput and protection are all required to continue the progress that Taiwan has made to date. These upgrades are all entirely possible and will surely enhance the already formidable strength of the Taiwan Armed Services. I urge Taiwan's leadership at every level to DELIVER on these reforms as an integral element to Taiwan's military strategy.

Third, and more to the direct topic of today's conference, I encourage Taiwan and its neighbors to DELIVER by grounding any domestic effort here in Taiwan in a regionally-aligned strategy to cooperate with research and development, supply chain resilience, production, and sustainment. Taiwan will not be able to meet its requirements on its own, even as it stands up a greater domestic engine for drone manufacturing. For example, capacity for exquisite testing and evaluation will be hard to come by here in Taiwan. But Australia has some of the world's greatest testing facilities. Japan has some of the greatest industrial depth in robotics. And the Philippines has a highly skilled workforce, geographic proximity, and an increasing desire to draw industry with favorable business terms.

If we take the time now to organize and energize a combined approach to industrial relationships, we will see the flourishing of industrial capacity throughout the Indo-Pacific region and its application to defense systems. Shipyards increasing production of naval systems, factory floors humming with adaptive manufacturing machines, hardened warehouses with parts and spares distributed throughout the region, depot maintenance hubs that shorten the lines of communication and extend the time on station of critical assets, and a new generation of skilled sustainers and maintainers ensuring that our combined military apparatus is operationally ready.

This is generally the work of contested logistics, an area of priority of the U.S. military but not yet, at least not that I have seen, an area of priority within the political and policy mindset of allies and partners throughout the region. I encourage governments in this region to make acquisition decisions with greater sustainment packages attached; to operationalize combined logistics frameworks such as the IPLN - the Indo-Pacific Logistics Network; to support the access of friendly foreign militaries; and to be as business-friendly as possible in order to bring the very large and growing pool of defense-related private capital into this region to prototype, build, test, scale, train and sustain forward. At times, politics can complicate this more cooperative approach to implementation that I am describing, but it is our responsibility to find a way forward. Incentivizing businesses to do more work in foreign locations doesn't typically get many votes at the polls. But when it can improve deterrence, we must push for it.

This is all work that can and should be done now that will set and enable the industrial theater to support our warfighters. I remind my colleagues in Washington at every opportunity that, if the United States must fight a war in this theater, our troops will fall in on a non-organic industrial base. Through cooperation with our friends in this region, we can array that forward defense industrial base to give all of us the greatest chance of prevailing in conflict, and therefore preventing conflict before it ever begins. The time to drive that work forward is at hand. For example, smaller, lighter systems require much less of a sustainment footprint and can easily be adapted to forward maintenance locations that can be obscured and distributed. Heavier systems are more obvious, require greater protection, and therefore are best located further from the most intense areas of a potential weapons engagement zone. Survivable prepositioning hubs must exist within reach of operators, and transit vehicles, whether air, land or sea, must be capable of traversing difficult routes in challenging conditions. The United States needs more support from Allies and partners throughout the region with access and permissions to support these efforts. And we all need to incentivize the industrial relationships that will ultimately be responsible for the necessary physical and digital assets to fight and win.

We are not starting from scratch. Governments, quite frankly, have already done much to support the integration project. Initiatives like the Partnership for Indo-Pacific Industrial Resilience, the Regional Sustainment Framework, and AUKUS Pillar 2 are ripe for the picking. To my colleagues in industry and the private sector, I encourage you to not wait for further government action. There is much we can do now with the tools that have already been supplied. Private capital aligned to standing government direction will be instrumental to realizing the deterrence architecture this region needs.

For what it is worth, I am staking my professional future on precisely this belief. I am currently working to establish further physical locations for multinational defense industry collaboration. Industrial parks that increase the capacity of our production lines. Research and development facilities deliberately designed to bring together governments, academic institutions, and industry partners that push the boundaries of novel weapons systems even further. Private test and evaluation ranges in the First Island Chain that can improve the performance of these novel systems in the environments where they are envisioned to be employed. Allies and partners in this region have their own comparative advantages somewhere along the production continuum.

We intend to facilitate the combination of those comparative advantages to solve for speed, scale and performance. Through this work I believe we can turn the best ideas and the best technologies, wherever they come from, into the best deterrence. Combined public and private efforts on a multilateral basis stand the greatest chance of accelerating the delivery clock and slowing the threat clock.

Fourth, the United States needs to DELIVER on Foreign Military Sales cases to Taiwan. To be clear, Taipei has no greater friend than Washington, D.C. Time and again our governments have found how to move forward together, learning from each other, enhancing one another's security, and standing together in the face of coercion and pressure. While there has been much chatter over the past couple of years, I do not believe the fundamental nature of our bilateral relationship has changed, and I remain optimistic that the practical realities will continue to magnetize our relationship, drawing us to combined, practical solutions.

I encourage the people of Taiwan to lean into the practical and mutually reinforcing elements of our relationship. My last boss when I was in government, Undersecretary Bridge Colby, has called for our diplomatic relationships to be aligned to metrics that "result in more ships in the water, expanded stockpiles of critical munitions, genuine interoperability, fielded hard power and the demonstrated political will to use it."

We should all embrace that charge. But I also ask the United States to hear those words and understand that they have the opportunity to do exactly that by fast-tracking key FMS cases that will result in the fielded hard power that they desire, right here in the region of greatest consequence. Let's deliver on this critical work and bend time towards deterrence. Doing so would be fully consistent with the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the Six Assurances and the Three Communiques that govern U.S. relations with Taiwan.

Colleagues, in my view, further political commitments towards multinational alliance formation remain unlikely over the next few years. The political architecture we have now will probably not change substantially, though modest adjustments, particularly on a bilateral basis, are possible. But, if we accelerate the delivery clock by taking positive and swift action in the areas I have outlined here, we will undoubtedly see greater regional integration on defense matters. This charge is indeed grounded in the kind of practical solutions heralded by U.S. senior leaders. Again, allow me to quote Undersecretary Bridge Colby: "We encourage collaboration among allies and partners as well as efforts to build up their defense industrial capacities… such efforts by our allies and close partners should integrate and be complementary with America's (efforts)."

Undersecretary Colby stated this in the context of increased defense spending, which I think in principle we all agree should occur, including by Taiwan, the United States, and our friend in this region. But I want to stress the underlying sentiment here: the United States Government is calling for greater integration on the basis of actual DELIVERY. He is affirming that the delivery clock is ticking, and that there is something we can do about it right now without relying on any further political commitments. It is a call to action, not words, both for governments and for defense industry.

That, in my mind, is the basis of the defense cooperative architecture that is emerging. We can slow the threat clock by accelerating the delivery clock, and we have the time to do that now, but we may not in the future.

Thank you for your attention.