Taiwan simulates Chinese invasion defeat in live-fire coastal drill

Taiwan’s military rehearsed a Chinese landing being smashed back into the sea in a live-fire coastal drill near Taichung, a show of force that highlighted how seriously Taipei is treating the risk of an assault across the Taiwan Strait. Along a 20-kilometer stretch of shoreline in central Taiwan, artillery and rocket crews fired as if they were building a kill zone against an amphibious assault.

The exercise used truck-mounted Thunderbolt-2000 rocket systems, U.S.-made Paladin howitzers, anti-tank missiles and mortars, with the Army’s Tenth Corps conducting heavy artillery training around the Dajia River estuary. Officers said the point was not a scripted display but a harsher, less predictable rehearsal. Artillery commander Ong Yih-ming said the training no longer relied on a fixed, routine formation, while rocket commander Liao Neng-cheng said his team arrived only one day before firing, instead of a week ahead as in earlier drills.

That narrower preparation window mattered. Taiwan’s annual Han Kuang exercises are now split between computerized simulations and live-fire drills, and the latest coastal firing fit a broader effort to make forces more mobile, faster to deploy and harder to anticipate. In 2025, the live-fire phase was expanded to 10 days and nine nights, twice the length of the previous format, and in April a senior defense official said this year’s drills were adopting U.S.-style rehearsal methods to improve coordination and combat readiness.

The message was aimed well beyond the training ground. Beijing continues to claim Taiwan as its territory and has not renounced the use of force to bring the island under its control. Taiwan’s government rejects that claim and says only Taiwan’s people can decide the island’s future. By practicing coastal attrition rather than symbolic firepower, Taiwan was signaling to Beijing that any landing force would face a layered and immediate fight, to Washington that it is adapting doctrine under pressure, and to its own public that the island’s defenses are being built around survival, not spectacle.

The drill also came two days after Taiwan said its coast guard expelled four Chinese government ships from restricted waters off the island’s south, a reminder that the confrontation across the strait is not abstract. On Taiwan’s exposed western coast, the line between daily pressure and wartime planning is narrowing, and the army is training as if that reality could arrive fast.