Taiwan is pushing hard to build up its drone forces, a sign it expects any future fight with China to be won partly by cheap unmanned weapons rather than big conventional hardware.

• President Lai Ching-te visited the army's new unmanned systems training command in southern Taiwan and promised more money for research, training and combat units.
• The military showed off six drone types for the first time together, including locally built attack drones and Switchblade 300 and ALTIUS-600M loitering munitions bought from the United States.
• Lessons from the Ukraine war and Middle East fighting are driving the shift, since technology on the battlefield now changes faster than armies can retrain.
• The command's next job is to stop counting how many operators it trains and start proving the drones actually work in combat conditions.
• New equipment will be tested in small batches with real units before wider rollout, the same approach Taiwan's defense ministry is using for other new technology.

Outlook: Expect Taiwan to keep buying and building more attack drones while it works out how they fit alongside regular troops, with more live-fire testing ahead.