The US did a lot of this during the Cold War: internet, smoke detectors, velcrow (?) were originally designed for defense purposes.
I know a lot of people here find Israel’s human rights record appalling (myself included), but they have become leaders in security software, mostly developed from devising ways to detect threats. The IDF has become a technology regime.
I think this is great, because we have to spend money on defense anyway. Why not develop technologies in the process? That we the old guns and butter debate isn’t a trade-off.
I haven’t heard of any military spinoff technologies from Taiwan. Reasons I can think of being:
We buy most of our stuff. We are developing indigenous subs, but they’re hardly cutting edge, I imagine.
I don’t know what technology could the Taiwanese military spin off to civilian sector.
It does not look like the ROC military spends that much on R&D anyways. Seems everything is basically technology transfers, licensing stuff from other countries like Israel or France. But why reinvent the wheel? If some other country will help Taiwan build cruise missiles, then accept the help.
Also the ROC doesn’t even spend that much of their GDP on military anyways since the focus is mainly defense, not projecting power.
Taiwan is a country that has faced an existential threat from day one. And given it has no shortage of engineers, it should be at the forefront of military technology.
They could do a lot more with drone tech I feel.
Now remember Taiwan relies on the US Congress for its existence with the Taiwan Relations Act.
And Congressmen and women rely on votes and patronage to be elected.
So the large numbers of TWD spent on US arms, not all of it very useful , are NOT necessarily wasted in Taiwan’s case. Plus Taiwan benefits from better trade agreements with the US when it can point to how much it spends on US arms.
