July 2024 was a quiet month for the backlog of US weapons that have been sold but not delivered to Taiwan. There were no new arms sales notified to Congress and no news of any weapons deliveries to Taiwan. The Taiwan arms sale backlog stands at $20.5 billion.

Figures 1 and 2 show the backlog by dollar value of weapons categories (asymmetric, traditional, and munitions), with Table 1 providing a detailed breakdown of the weapons platforms in the backlog.

While there were no new arms sales for July, there were two developments in Taiwan arms sales worth mentioning.

On July 17, China announced its suspension of arms control and nuclear proliferation talks with the United States due to recent US arms sales to Taiwan. These negotiations began after the November 2023 Biden-Xi summit in San Francisco, though China was reportedly not responsive to US efforts to have subsequent rounds of discussions after an initial round in late 2023.

The breakdown of US-China nuclear talks is a disappointing development, though given the current state of the relationship not much is lost from their cancellation. To halt US arms sales, Beijing typically sanctions US defense companies, despite these companies being legally prohibited from doing business with China. Linking nuclear talks with arms sales, especially over a sale of short-range loitering munitions that pose no threat to the Chinese mainland, is unlikely to change US behavior.

The second piece of news from July pertains to an August 2023 sale of Infrared Search and Track (IRST) systems that will equip Taiwan’s F‑16 fighter aircraft. IRST pods search for infrared emissions, such as heat from engine exhaust, allowing them to detect targets with a small radar signature. A stealth aircraft may appear very small on radar but is easier to detect using IRST systems. Our dataset codes the IRST pod as a traditional capability because it is a sub-component of another traditional capability: crewed fighter aircraft.

According to a Taiwanese government e‑procurement notice from July 12, 2024, the IRST pods are now under contract. The notice gives a date range of June 2024 to December 2030 for the contract, but it does not specify how many IRST systems are being procured. Nor does the notice indicate when delivery is expected to be completed. There is also no Department of Defense notice for an IRST contract award as of August 5, 2024, meaning we are currently unable to cross-reference the Taiwan procurement notice against a US defense contract announcement.

Moreover, the final delivery date for the IRST pods is unknown. The period mentioned in the procurement notice may include support for IRST pods after they are delivered and installed on Taiwan’s fighter aircraft. Our dataset would remove the IRST systems from the backlog after delivery, and not cover post-delivery support. In the meantime, we will keep the IRST systems in the backlog and will continue to monitor its progress.

Taiwan Arms Backlog Dataset, July 2024

On Wednesday, July 24, President Joe Biden delivered a speech in which he claimed he is the “first president of this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world.” Anyone following current events knows that this is, as Biden likes to say, pure “malarky.” The current president may not have initiated any new wars, but he ended only one of the many unnecessary conflicts he inherited and continues to support many others.

To Biden’s credit, he completed the withdrawal from Afghanistan and he has not started a new war or committed troops to the two highest casualty wars occurring right now: the war in Ukraine and the war in Gaza. However, that does not mean the United States is not involved in those conflicts. Using presidential drawdown authority, Biden has transferred billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Ukraine and has considered sending additional American military advisors to the country. The Biden administration has approved over 100 weapons transfers to Israel worth more than $41 billion and $15 billion in military aid. Whether the public agrees or disagrees with the administration’s actions, both conflicts have the potential for escalation that could lead to direct US military involvement.

Despite not technically having officially declared war since World War II, the United States is engaged in numerous conflicts across the globe. The Pentagon’s Defense Casualty Analysis System reported the deaths of thirteen US service members from “hostile action” under the first two years of the Biden administration, for which data are available. While this is less than the sixty-five deaths from hostile action under the Trump administration, these casualty numbers cut against Biden’s claims.

In the Middle East, US forces remain in harm’s way despite the region’s declining strategic relevance to the United States. Today, a total of 900 troops are deployed in Syria and 2,500 military personnel remain in Iraq. These troops represent sitting ducks, serving no strategic purpose for the US.

Since October 2023, Iran-backed groups have launched more than 170 attacks on US troops in Iraq and Syria, as recently as yesterday. So far, these attacks have resulted in the tragic deaths of three US service members in Jordan and left at least 130 American troops with traumatic brain injuries. US support for the Saudi Arabia-led war in Yemen helped the Houthis consolidate power and align with Iran.

The Houthis have attacked over fifty shipping vessels since November 2023 in retaliation to Western support for Israel’s war in Gaza. US naval forces have launched numerous strikes against the Houthis, including the day of Biden’s Oval Office address. Pentagon officials and analysts alike have labeled these attacks as the toughest running sea battle that the US Navy has faced since World War II. So far, casualties include two Navy SEALS during an interdiction mission of a ship carrying Iranian weapons.

Involvement in Yemen also epitomizes how objectiveless the War on Terror has been. When asked about the strikes against the Houthis, Biden said, “When you say ‘working,’ are they stopping the Houthis? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” Besides placing US troops in danger, this tit-for-tat between the US Navy and the Houthis has cost the United States around $1 billion in missiles and munitions.

Despite this, the Middle East is neither more stable nor secure.

Outside of the Middle East, the United States under Biden has been involved in active combat throughout the African continent, with most of these missions taking place under Operation Juniper Shield, a counterterrorism mission. Today, the United States has approximately 10,219 troops deployed throughout Africa at approximately twenty bases throughout the continent, including Somalia, Mali, Kenya, Chad, and Niger. Just as in the Middle East, the results of US troops in Africa have been lackluster at best. Somalia remains a failed state, and coups have upended Mali and Niger. Though plans to withdraw US troops from Niger and Chad are welcomed, a Pentagon spokesperson called this only a “temporary step.”

Biden’s speech presented an incomplete picture of Washington’s myriad military engagements abroad to the American public. The United States remains deeply involved in objective-less and counterproductive conflicts around the globe, endangering US troops and jeopardizing American security.

In my 2023 paper, “Uncle Sucker,” I lamented the failure of US efforts to shift the burdens of defense back onto the shoulders of US allies and client states. During the Cold War, Congress required presidential administrations to produce a report on “Allied Contributions to the Common Defense.”

In that report, as former Pentagon official Richard Perle would later admit, US officials would portray allied defense efforts in the most favorable possible light to protect them from political pressure in the United States to lessen the American commitment to their defense. In Perle’s words, he was always “thinking of ways to put the best possible gloss on some pretty dismal figures … we look for statistics that make the allies look good.”

Although the report was ineffective at shifting defense burdens, it performed the service of making administration officials uncomfortable while they played Robert Shapiro to the allies’ OJ.

Utah Senator Mike Lee has introduced a couple of new bills that should interest readers. The “NATO Burden Sharing Report Act” expresses the sense of Congress that “the United States should not continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of the burden for European security.”

That bill reinstates an amped-up version of the Allied Contributions to the Common Defense report, stipulating that such a report should include figures on defense spending, defense spending as a percentage of GDP, contributions to Ukraine’s defense, a look at the countries’ defense-industrial bases, plus the size, structure, and independence of the countries’ militaries.

Lee also introduced a more general “Allied Burden Sharing Report Act” that includes countries outside Europe, examining many of the same issues. Rep. Warren Davidson, who spoke at Cato on NATO last week, has spearheaded a similar effort in the House, getting a provision for an Allied Burdensharing report into the House version of the 2025 NDAA.

With the United States $35 trillion in debt, the programs producing the debt seeming insulated from reforms, and current Congresses throwing another $1.5 trillion on the fire of debt each year, the time has come to twist allies’ arms on their own efforts. They will not like it, and the swampy “transatlantic community” will not like it. But American taxpayers and service members deserve a more serious look at the allies’ contributions to their own defense. It isn’t 1949 anymore.

The backlog of US arms sales to Taiwan grew in June 2024 to $20.5 billion, an increase of almost $840 million from the previous month. As shown in Figures 1 and 2, asymmetric capabilities account for the backlog’s growth in June.

June 2024 featured two major developments: the first arms sales under the newly inaugurated Lai Ching-te administration, and the release of a Ministry of National Defense (MND) report to Taiwan’s legislature that provides new information about several delayed arms packages.

For a detailed list of the arms packages in the backlog, see Table 1.

Lai Administration Off to a Good Start

The Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) announced four new Foreign Military Sales (FMS) cases to Taiwan in June 2024. These arms sales should please advocates of an asymmetric defense strategy for Taiwan as they suggest that the Lai administration is taking asymmetric defense seriously. 

The four new FMS cases are split between maintaining Taiwan’s existing traditional capabilities and acquiring new asymmetric capabilities. Traditional capabilities are more flexible than asymmetric capabilities, but are also more expensive to buy and maintain. Though Taiwan’s military has made some progress toward an asymmetric strategy—which offers a better chance of resisting a Chinese invasion attempt—it has generally favored traditional capabilities.

Two of the June arms sales maintain Taiwan’s existing traditional capabilities while the other two acquire new asymmetric systems.

On June 5, the DSCA announced sales of standard and non-standard spare parts for F‑16 fighter aircraft for $220 million and $80 million, respectively. We did not include these two sales in the arms backlog dataset because they maintain existing capabilities that Taiwan could use to protect itself, whereas our dataset covers US weapons that Taiwan does not have yet.

Sales of F‑16 spare parts help Taiwan maintain the aircraft it already possesses, but Washington should not sell Taipei new aircraft. Traditional capabilities, like F‑16s, can conduct a wider range of missions than asymmetric capabilities, but their vulnerability to China’s superior traditional forces makes them less useful in a high-end conflict.

The two June 2024 FMS cases that are included in the backlog comprise a $300 million sale of 291 ALTIUS 600-Ms and a $60 million sale of 720 Switchblade 300s, both of which are loitering munitions—small unmanned aerial vehicles armed with explosives that detonate when the vehicle crashes into a target. Loitering munitions have been used extensively by Ukraine’s military against invading Russian forces. For Taiwan, putting many of these capabilities in the hands of small units gives options for conducting precise attacks, even if Taiwan’s more advanced strike capabilities like aircraft or artillery are disrupted or destroyed.

The State Department is confident that Taiwan will receive these 1,011 loitering munitions by the end of 2025. If this timeline proves accurate, it would be a major success story for a US arms sale to Taiwan.

MND Reports Reveal Significant Delays

A majority of the $837 million increase in the arms backlog comes from adding old weapons sales back to the backlog. Initially, we did not include these items in the backlog, as other sources indicated that these weapons had been delivered. However, two reports from Taiwan’s MND that we located and translated this month indicate that these weapons are, in fact, delayed.

The two MND sources are a June 2024 letter to the Legislative Yuan on the status of five arms sales (three delayed, two ahead of schedule), and an excerpt of a report on the MND’s 2024 budget request published in October 2023. Based on these sources, we added three asymmetric arms sales to the backlog worth a combined $477 million.

In late 2015, the United States announced sales of Stinger man-portable air defense missiles and TOW-2B anti-tank missiles to Taiwan. While SIPRI’s Arms Transfers Database claimed both packages were delivered, Taiwan’s MND said otherwise.

For the Stinger missiles, the October 2023 MND report says there have been multiple issues with both the 2015 sale (250 missiles for Taiwan’s navy) and a later 2019 sale (250 missiles for Taiwan’s army). Bureaucratic issues in the MND created a delay in both programs, requiring a new Letter of Acceptance for the sales, which was signed in 2020.

According to the MND report, delivery of the Stingers was originally supposed to occur in 2020 (navy sale only) but it was revised twice, first to 2022 and then to no later than 2025 (both navy and army sales). According to the Taiwanese press, Taiwan received an initial shipment of Stinger missiles in 2023, but based on the MND report and subsequent press reporting, we assess that neither the 2015 sale nor the 2019 sale have been completely delivered. The October 2023 MND report states that since 2021 Taiwan issued two letters of protest to the United States over delays in Stinger deliveries. The 2015 Stinger sale increases the backlog by $217 million.

As for the TOW-2B missiles, the United States announced a sale of over 750 missiles for $268 million in late 2015 which was revised downward in 2018 to 460 missiles for $131 million. In July 2019, the United States updated this sale, adding 1,240 TOW missiles valued at $241 million for a total of 1,700 missiles and $372 million.

Per the October 2023 MND report, the initial tranche of 460 missiles was supposed to be delivered by 2022, but this was pushed to late 2023. The June 2024 MND letter goes on to say that none of the 1,700 missiles have arrived due to US production delays and issues with pre-shipment quality control testing. Our dataset already included the 1,240 missiles, but not the 460 missile sales. Based on the new MND letter, we have added the smaller sale to the backlog.

Taiwan’s defense minister claimed that all 1,700 TOW missiles will arrive by the end of 2024. Yet the fact remains that Taiwan has not received any of a relatively simple capability first notified to Congress nine years ago.

The final addition to the backlog from the MND reports is a July 2019 modification to a 2015 sale of Javelin missiles and launchers. This modification covers 400 Javelin missiles and 46 launchers valued at $129 million (the 2015 sale was delivered in 2020). According to the October 2023 MND report, Taiwan was supposed to receive the 400 Javelin missiles and 46 launchers by the end of 2022. The June 2024 MND letter clarifies that all the launcher units were delivered, but not all the missiles have arrived. As of June 2024, 251 missiles have been delivered, with the remaining 149 scheduled to arrive by the end of the year.

The Javelin delivery timeline is not as significantly delayed as the Stinger and TOW missiles. However, it was missing from previous versions of our dataset, which we have fixed.

Conclusion

The month of June was a mixed bag for the Taiwan arms sale backlog. The first US arms sales to the Lai administration will advance Taiwan’s asymmetric capabilities, which are essential for effective defense against a Chinese invasion. However, new information from Taiwan’s MND reveals longer delays for several key asymmetric capabilities.

Putting Taiwan in a better position to protect itself from China will require shorter delays in arms deliveries, and US policymakers need to do more to identify and fix the sources of delays.

Taiwan Arms Backlog Dataset, June 2024

Monday evening (June 24), news broke that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, under indictment by the United States government since 2019 on Espionage Act charges related to his role in the exposure of US war crimes during the Iraq War, had reached a plea deal with American authorities. In return for pleading guilty to one count of Conspiracy to Obtain and Disclose National Defense Information (18 U.S.C. § 793(g)), Assange will be sentenced to time served in Belmarsh Prison, United Kingdom, where Assange has been held for over five years.

As I wrote last month when fresh chatter about a possible end to the Assange prosecution bubbled up from various sources inside and outside the federal government:

American national security bureaucrats and prominent political figures have never forgiven Assange and WikiLeaks for exposing clear‐​cut war crimes committed by US forces in Iraq during the George W. Bush administration. The US government used its own document classification system and policy to conceal those war crimes, which included the murder of journalists and Iraqi civilians caught on video from a U.S. Army helicopter.

Yet the coverage of the High Court’s most recent decision in Assange’s favor by outlets such as the BBC, the Associated Press, ABC, and The New York Times includes no reference to that fact. There’s no mention of how the “leader of the free world” used patently undemocratic methods not only to hide criminal conduct by its military but also to politically and legally destroy Assange and Chelsea Manning—the whistleblower who leaked the helicopter murder video to WikiLeaks.

Once again, Justice Department and US Intelligence Community (USIC) officials have succeeded in punishing a whistleblower for daring to expose the federal government’s own criminal conduct during wartime.

Assange may soon return to freedom in Australia, but he will no doubt arrive a broken man from the experience—physically and psychologically. The US government’s successful multi-year pursuit of Assange was meant to send a message to any others considering exposing federal government wrongdoing in the national security arena: we will make the story about you, not our crimes, and we will get you, one way or another.

Over a decade ago, Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2012, which became Public Law 112–81 (10 U.S.C. 801 note). Section 1021(b) of that mammoth bill included language allowing US military forces to indefinitely detain anyone who “planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored those responsible for those attacks” as well as “a person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.”

It is the second clause, with its undefined terms of “aided,” “supported,” and “associated forces” that set off alarm bells among civil liberties defenders. Would someone who posted something online suggesting Taliban military operations against coalition forces were an act of self-defense be considered “aiding” or “supporting” the Taliban? In a much more contemporary context, would Americans expressing outrage against mass civilian casualties in Gaza as a result of Israeli military action be viewed as “aiding” or “supporting” Hamas, a State Department–designated terrorist organization?

The American Civil Liberties Union noted in late 2011:

The law is an historic threat because it codifies indefinite military detention without charge or trial into law for the first time in American history. It could permit the president—and all future presidents—to order the military to imprison indefinitely civilians captured far from any battlefield without charge or trial.

Ever since Section 1021(b)‘s enactment, there have been attempts to repeal or modify the language. This afternoon, the latest effort—led by Rep. Matt Rosendale (R‑MT)—succeeded when his amendment to the FY 2025 NDAA was adopted by voice vote. Rosendale’s amendment, if it survives the House-Senate NDAA conference process and remains in the bill, would prohibit American military forces from indefinitely detaining a US citizen under Section 1021(b). In a year with otherwise terrible news on the constitutional rights front, this is one victory very much worth celebrating.

According to a new report in the Wall Street Journal, the Biden administration is close to finalizing a proposed treaty with Saudi Arabia that would include a formal US security guarantee for the kingdom and assistance from the United States in facilitating a civilian nuclear program, if Riyadh normalizes relations with Israel.

The treaty, the “Strategic Alliance Agreement,” is supposedly modeled on Washington’s security pact with other partners, such as Japan and South Korea, and would therefore require a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate for approval. However, Saudi Arabia has insisted that to move forward Israel must end its military campaign in Gaza and rhetorically commit to a “pathway” toward a two-state solution with Palestinians, something Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected.

Though its future is uncertain, this effort by Washington should be denounced for what it is: an extension of a failed US Middle East policy.

President Biden’s unceasing drive for this “mega-deal” is rooted in the same magical thinking that has repeatedly brought the United States to ruin in the Middle East. This deal would achieve nothing for the United States, binding our regional policies to a principal source of instability in the Middle East, while planting the seeds for future disorder.

Saudi Arabia is not an ally—no amount of concessions to the kingdom will change this. Failure to abandon this disastrous agenda risks formalizing Washington’s commitment to a cycle of turmoil that will continue to impact the region—and undermine US interests—for generations.