Jack Detsch
Taiwan is looking to buy U.S.-made loitering munitions—also known as suicide drones—which have become one of the signature weapons on the modern battlefield, from Nagorno-Karabakh to Ukraine, hovering over fighting for hours at a time before swooping in for the kill.
Taiwan—which has faced near-daily Chinese military exercises for the past three years, including People’s Liberation Army fighter jets flooding the island’s air defense identification zone and virtually erasing the median line that sits across the Taiwan Strait—is said to covet both variants of the AeroVironment Switchblade drone, according to four people familiar with the situation.
The Switchblade, which can fit in a backpack in its smallest form and also has a much larger variant that can be used to take out tanks and armored vehicles, costs about $50,000 per drone, according to the manufacturer. The U.S. Army has stopped buying the smaller variant, known as the Switchblade 300, but the new supplemental budget passed by Congress gives the Defense Department about $72 million to buy several hundred more of the larger variant, the Switchblade 600, and the service is expected to begin fielding the drones next year.
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