The London Turn: Taiwan’s Best Remaining Path to Fighter Independence

Taiwan’s cancelled Advanced Defence Fighter programme exposed a persistent dependence on US-controlled propulsion and combat-systems integration, limiting its ability to achieve true aerospace autonomy despite decades of indigenous capability development. In response, the article argues that the UK—through BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce and a more flexible export-control regime—offers the most plausible external pathway for closing Taiwan’s critical industrial gaps in a gradual, commercially viable co-development model.

Taiwan’s Advanced Defence Fighter Programme (ADF) did not fail for want of ambition. When Defence Minister Wellington Koo confirmed its cancellation in October 2024, the programme had absorbed years of classified development work, billions of New Taiwan dollars and considerable institutional prestige (Everington, 2024).

What it could not absorb were the two engineering problems deferred since its inception: the propulsion gap that Project Vega never closed, and a combat-systems integration architecture that remained dependent on American firms unwilling to serve as primary contractors. The meeting report put the problem plainly. The most important combat systems were integrated by American companies, yet those companies would not participate as principals in the programme (Lo and Chin, 2024; Satam, 2024).

Neither failure should have surprised anyone who had followed Taiwan’s fighter-indigenisation effort across the previous three decades. The ADF’s cancellation was less a verdict on Taiwan’s aerospace industrial capacity than a precise diagnosis of where that capacity ends. Taiwan’s central problem is not an absence of aerospace capability, but the concentration of foreign dependence in a narrow range of strategically decisive technologies. It can design airframes, manufacture sophisticated components and integrate systems at considerable scale, yet remains dependent in precisely those areas, particularly propulsion and advanced combat-systems integration, that determine whether an indigenous fighter can become technologically autonomous.

The National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST) and Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation (AIDC) in Taichung possess genuine competencies: airframe design, component-level systems integration and licensed manufacturing of considerable sophistication. The Brave Eagle advanced trainer represents real industrial progress, with a reported self-sufficiency rate of 55 per cent (Trimble and Chuanren, 2023; Chen, 2024). Yet that figure also illustrates the ceiling. The trainer’s remaining foreign components overlap substantially with the areas subsequently identified as critical weaknesses in the ADF programme.

This makes things clear when attempting to understand fighter independence as an all-or-nothing question of whether every component is produced domestically. The more important measure is whether Taiwan controls the technologies whose denial would prevent it from independently developing, upgrading and sustaining the platform. On that measure, the ADF exposed a persistent deficit in industrial sovereignty rather than a general failure of Taiwan’s defence-industrial base.

Taiwan’s defence acquisition system was built around American prime contractors, a rational response to a security environment that rewarded licensed production and direct procurement over expensive indigenous development. What that environment also produced, however, was an institutional posture that endured beyond the point at which it necessarily served Taiwan’s long-term industrial interests.

The IDF procurement reduction of 1991 provides the clearest illustration. The original Republic of China Air Force (ROCAF) order stood at 256 aircraft. When the Bush administration approved the sale of 150 F-16A/B Block 20s and France offered 60 Mirage 2000-5s, the order was reduced to 130 (Trimble and Chuanren, 2023). The engineers at AIDC understood what this meant beyond the immediate production numbers: the engine-upgrade programme ended, the propulsion-development pathway narrowed and two decades of advanced development capacity were sustained closer to maintenance levels than expanded into a continuously developing industrial ecosystem.

The decision was understandable as procurement policy. Taiwan needed capable aircraft and suddenly had access to proven foreign platforms. As industrial policy, however, it carried a different consequence. Foreign procurement met the immediate military requirement while reducing the scale and continuity necessary to deepen indigenous technological capability. Therefore, the choice was not a simplistic one between the IDF and the F-16 or Mirage. It was also between acquiring operational capability quickly and sustaining an industrial pathway whose strategic value would only become apparent decades later.

When the F-16 became available, the question of whether the IDF was merely a platform or also an industrial investment largely answered itself. The ADF was subsequently designed in the shadow of that decision.

This article therefore proceeds from the ADF’s cancellation not to argue that Taiwan must manufacture an entirely autonomous fighter immediately, but to ask which external partnership could most plausibly help it close the specific technological gaps that have repeatedly frustrated indigenous development. It first examines why continued reliance on the American model is unlikely to provide the industrial knowledge Taiwan requires, before assessing Britain as the strongest presently identifiable alternative through BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce. It then considers what Taiwan itself would need to institutionalise before such cooperation could become commercially and politically credible. The proposition is consequently narrower than complete fighter independence: it is that the United Kingdom may provide Taiwan with a viable route towards greater control over the technologies on which future fighter autonomy depends.

Why Washington Cannot Help

The American route to advanced fighter technology for Taiwan is constrained not simply by political willingness, but by a legal, regulatory and commercial architecture that makes the depth of technology transfer required for genuine ADF co-development exceptionally difficult.

The Export Control Reform Act and US Munitions List (USML) Category VIII subject fighters, fighter-bombers and associated advanced systems to extensive controls, placing substantial limits on the transfer of technologies that an indigenous fighter programme would require (US Department of State, 2016).

Taiwan’s own experience confirmed this problem. NCSIST obtained approval under a Technical Assistance Agreement relating to the F414 engine, but was reportedly denied access to 17 additional items, including advanced electronic systems, precisely the technologies the ADF needed most (Everington, 2024). Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin add a further commercial constraint. Their exposure to international markets, including China, creates powerful reasons to avoid participation as primary contractors in a Taiwanese indigenous fighter programme even where narrower forms of licensed support remain possible.

The narrower point is that the existing American system is designed principally around tightly controlled exports, Foreign Military Sales and licensed support rather than the transfer of the broad systems-integration and industrial knowledge that Taiwan would need to reduce its long-term dependence on American prime contractors. Washington can remain Taiwan’s principal source of combat aircraft while continuing to be an unsuitable partner for the particular objective of technological autonomy.

Taiwan does not merely need another country willing to sell it a fighter. It needs industrial firms capable of participating as development partners in the two areas where its domestic industrial base cannot yet operate independently, and a regulatory environment that does not foreclose such cooperation from the outset.

Any prospective partner must therefore meet several conditions simultaneously: possess advanced propulsion or systems-integration expertise; be able to transfer manufacturing or integration knowledge rather than merely finished equipment; have a plausible commercial reason to cooperate with AIDC; and operate within an export-control regime capable of assessing such transfers individually. Britain does not uniquely possess all of these characteristics, and other industrial relationships may ultimately prove possible. Measured against those requirements, and the evidence presently available, however, the United Kingdom combines them more convincingly than any alternatives accessible to Taiwan today.

BAE Systems already operates within Taiwan’s fighter ecosystem. A February 2026 contract valued at approximately $98.8 million covers avionics intermediate-shop sustainment for the global F-16 fleet, including Taiwan (ClearanceJobs, 2026). A separate $92 million contract covers the upgrade of Taiwan’s F-16 Hybrid Flight Control Computers to digital capability (MilitaryLeak, 2022). These contracts do not amount to indigenous fighter co-development, but they demonstrate that BAE already possesses both technical familiarity with the platform environment and an established commercial relationship involving Taiwan.

Rolls-Royce, meanwhile, occupies a central position in the propulsion consortium for the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), alongside IHI and Avio Aero. The work includes advanced manufacturing techniques relevant to hot-section components, additive manufacturing and advanced duct production, precisely the areas in which a successor to Project Vega would need eventually to acquire greater competence (Defence Industry Europe, 2026).

The Export Control Joint Unit’s (ECJU) case-by-case licensing architecture provides a further potential advantage. British export applications are assessed individually against established criteria, including regional stability and national-security considerations (Proelium Law, 2024).

Fighter-related technology supplied to Taiwan would remain politically sensitive, and any application involving particularly advanced capabilities could still be rejected. Nor can all technology associated with British participation in GCAP necessarily be treated as British technology available for unilateral transfer: third-party intellectual property, programme-security arrangements and foreign-controlled components could constrain what BAE or Rolls-Royce were able to share.

The British advantage is therefore relative rather than absolute. However, a case-by-case licensing regime creates a potential pathway for carefully bounded transfers of manufacturing knowledge and systems-integration expertise where the American model has repeatedly proved restrictive. The London Turn depends on exploiting that regulatory space without assuming that Britain would permit the transfer of complete fighter technologies.

The Case for BAE and Rolls-Royce

BAE’s interest in a Taiwan co-development arrangement would not primarily rest on assisting Taiwan. GCAP’s trilateral architecture, formalised in December 2022 and elevated to treaty status the following year, places British industry within a programme intended to deliver a next-generation combat-air capability alongside Japan and Italy (Royal Air Force, 2023). BAE is consequently operating within an environment in which advanced systems integration, digital engineering and combat-air architecture will become increasingly central to its competitive position.

What this means in practice is that BAE must demonstrate, over the coming decade, that it can lead a major combat systems integration programme at the sixth-generation technology level without defaulting to American prime contractor oversight. The Pyramid avionics architecture BAE has been developing for GCAP’s demonstrator aircraft is part of that demonstration (Tyrer-Jones, 2024).

An AIDC partnership, structured around advanced avionics integration and combat-system architecture, could therefore provide a commercially meaningful programme through which BAE expands experience in areas relevant to future combat-air development. Taiwan is not a charity; it is a commercially rational proving ground for a firm under competitive pressure to demonstrate systems integration leadership on its own terms.

Taiwan would not automatically constitute an attractive ‘proving ground’ simply because BAE possesses relevant capabilities. Participation would expose the company to political risk, technology-security obligations and potential commercial consequences in China and elsewhere. The case for cooperation therefore depends on AIDC offering more than strategic alignment: it must offer engineering competence, reliable programme funding and a clearly bounded development objective capable of producing commercial value commensurate with those risks.

Taiwan’s approach to Rolls-Royce has also historically been framed too ambitiously. The ADF sought foreign assistance towards the development of a complete fighter engine. That is precisely the type of technology transfer that governments and defence companies are least likely to support.

A more realistic objective is different. Taiwan does not initially need a finished engine. It needs access to the manufacturing competencies from which an indigenous propulsion capability can eventually emerge: hot-section metallurgy, additive manufacturing for combustor components, advanced duct production and the precision-engineering techniques necessary for high-performance turbine manufacture (Chu, 2024).

This aligns more closely with Rolls-Royce’s commercial interests. Rather than asking the company to co-develop a Taiwanese fighter engine from the outset, AIDC could pursue a supplier-development partnership centred on precision components and advanced manufacturing for Rolls-Royce programmes. Supplier qualification is already a routine element of global aerospace production. As AIDC demonstrates manufacturing competence, cooperation could gradually broaden into technologies with greater relevance to military propulsion.

China exposure remains an obvious concern. Civil aerospace continues to constitute a major component of Rolls-Royce’s business, giving Beijing potential commercial leverage. The company’s recent strategy has nevertheless placed increased emphasis on higher-margin activities and its role within future defence programmes, including GCAP (Rolls-Royce Holdings plc, 2025).

A carefully structured supplier relationship with Taiwan could therefore support both commercial and strategic objectives without requiring an immediate commitment to fighter co-development. But London and Taipei should not assume that strategic logic will automatically override commercial exposure as Beijing’s capacity to impose costs on firms cooperating with Taiwan is one of the principal uncertainties surrounding the entire London Turn, and any serious policy proposal must account for it rather than treating corporate participation as inevitable. However, for Taiwan, the advantage of this gradual approach is precisely that it does not depend upon persuading a foreign government or company to transfer an entire propulsion system. Instead, it seeks to build the industrial capabilities whose absence has persisted since the contraction of the IDF programme.

The objective is not to import an engine. It is to acquire enough of the manufacturing expertise required to design, produce and sustain one increasingly independently over time.

What the London Turn Actually Requires

The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) and Department for Business and Trade (DBT) should, through appropriate channels, make the regulatory environment sufficiently legible for BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce to assess whether cooperation with Taiwan is commercially viable. The MOD and DBT should signal to BAE and Rolls-Royce, through appropriate informal channels, that an Export Control Joint Unit (ECJU) licence application for advanced avionics integration and manufacturing process knowledge, structured as a commercial co-development arrangement with a credible security protocol, would receive a sympathetic hearing.

This requires no formal government-to-government commitment and no public announcement. It requires only that Britain’s stated Indo-Pacific posture become sufficiently operational for firms to determine whether exploring a Taiwan partnership is worth the commercial and political cost (House of Commons Library, n.d.; Choong and Tan, 2024).

Without some indication of regulatory openness, Taiwan’s preparations may prove necessary but insufficient. Neither company has an obvious incentive to invest substantial resources in designing a partnership whose eventual licensing prospects are unknowable.

Yet British signalling is only one side of the equation. The more difficult requirements lie in Taipei.

Programme status is the most foundational for Taipei’s requirements. Neither BAE nor Rolls-Royce is likely to commit significant engineering resources to an initiative that exists principally as an executive preference vulnerable to reversal by a future defence minister or budget cycle.

The ADF possessed precisely this vulnerability. It remained alive under Tsai Ing-wen, was reconsidered under Lai Ching-te and was cancelled in October 2024 without, as far as public reporting indicates, substantial institutional resistance within the defence establishment (Everington, 2024; Satam, 2024).

The programme’s cancellation suggests that indigenous fighter development lacked the degree of political and budgetary protection required for a multi-decade industrial strategy. A foreign partner deciding whether to dedicate engineers, intellectual property and corporate resources to Taiwan will evaluate not only current intentions, but whether the programme is likely to survive political turnover.

Legislative Yuan authorisation for a successor programme, accompanied by a committed budget line and defined development trajectory, would therefore provide an important signal of continuity (Blumenthal et al., 2025).

Lai Ching-te’s defence-industrial posture makes this requirement more difficult. Lai has prioritised asymmetric capabilities, accelerated drone and missile programmes and directed substantial resources towards capabilities intended to strengthen Taiwan’s near-term resilience (USNI News, 2025; Army Recognition, 2025).

There is no clear public indication that renewed indigenous fighter development has become a funded priority of comparable importance. Without such a signal, the London Turn remains a strategic option that Taipei has not yet chosen to exercise.

This creates a strategic trade-off. Taiwan faces an immediate requirement to expand missiles, drones, air defence and other asymmetric capabilities, while an indigenous fighter-industrial strategy would require sustained investment over a much longer horizon. The argument for the London Turn is therefore not that fighter development should replace asymmetric defence, but that Taiwan must decide whether maintaining an advanced combat-air industrial base is itself a strategic capability worth funding alongside more immediate needs.

AIDC’s manufacturing competency is the second requirement. BAE evaluating AIDC as a potential development partner would look for demonstrated capability in combat-system architecture, avionics and sensor integration. Rolls-Royce would require evidence of precision manufacturing, process reliability and advanced engineering standards capable of supporting highly demanding aerospace components.

The Brave Eagle programme brought AIDC meaningfully closer to co-developer status, but the gap between advanced trainer development and next-generation combat-system or propulsion cooperation remains substantial (Wu, Tu and Chin, 2023).

The initial approach through AIDC’s commercial channels and the British Trade and Cultural Office should therefore lead with a capability offer rather than a political appeal. BAE and Rolls-Royce will ultimately make partnership decisions according to commercial and technical logic. AIDC must arrive with something both companies have reason to value (House of Commons Library, n.d.).

Technology security is the third requirement. Taiwan enacted technology-protection reforms under the Tsai administration that represented important progress, including stronger penalties relating to economic espionage and sensitive technologies (Strong, 2022; Taipei Times, 2022). For cooperation involving advanced combat systems or propulsion knowledge, however, general statutory protection would not be sufficient. A dedicated security architecture, potentially incorporating compartmentalised facilities, audited access arrangements, personnel vetting and technology-specific controls, would be necessary to reassure either company that sensitive intellectual property could be protected.

This requirement becomes even more important if any proposed cooperation involves technologies subject to third-party restrictions. BAE and Rolls-Royce operate within multinational supply chains in which intellectual property is rarely controlled by a single actor. Taiwan would therefore need a security framework capable not only of satisfying British industry, but of demonstrating that externally controlled technology can be properly segregated from any bilateral programme. Without such arrangements, every other preparation becomes secondary.

The Question Taiwan Has Not Yet Answered

The ADF’s cancellation makes one thing newly possible: clarity. The procurement substitute that Taiwan’s political class has reached for in every previous iteration of this cycle is not available in the same form.

The Americans will not sell a fifth-generation fighter on terms Taiwan can accept any more than they will support indigenous fifth-generation development on terms Taiwan can access (TaiwanPlus, 2023; Lo and Chin, 2024). The exit from the co-development commitment that existed in 1991, when the F-16 appeared, and in 2003, when post-IDF atrophy went uncontested, does not exist today.

That constraint is also the condition under which Taiwan might finally be forced to make the institutional choices it has deferred across three decades.

The London Turn is structurally available in ways that no previous iteration of this argument could claim: the commercial relationships exist, the corporate incentives are aligned, and the legal architecture permits what American law forecloses.

What no external analysis can supply is confidence that Taiwan’s political class will treat this moment of clarity as an instruction to act rather than as a temporary disruption.

The 1991 ambiguity was never resolved. Every subsequent programme inherited it. Whether the ADF’s cancellation finally forces its resolution, or whether Taiwan’s defence establishment finds another way to defer the question, will not be determined by the structural availability of the London Turn.

It will be determined by whether Taiwan’s political class can finally decide what fighter indigenisation is actually for. If the answer is sovereign industrial capacity, London is where that project should begin. If the answer remains uncertain, the next programme will end in the same meeting room in Taipei, for the same reasons, with a different name on the agenda.

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