Anti-jamming change delays the last 85 of Taiwan's army Capricorn drones

Taiwan's army will not receive the last of the 201 tactical short-range drones in its second-phase order until as late as 20 January 2027, according to a defence ministry report to the Legislative Yuan described by the China Times on Tuesday 10 November. The report says 116 of the rotary-wing drones have been delivered and issued to units, leaving 85 still to come.

The ministry put the slip down to a change the military itself requested after the contract was awarded on 14 August 2024. On top of the 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz frequency-hopping links in the original specification, the army asked for an extra wartime frequency band to make the drones harder to jam. Because the supplier had to rework the product's frequencies, it was granted 96 more days under the contract, which moved the deadline for the fifth and final batch to 20 January 2027.

The report was written to unlock frozen money. The programme carries NT$1.28 billion across the 2024 to 2026 budgets, and Kuomintang legislator Ma Wen-chun proposed freezing NT$200 million of it because she judged that deliveries were unlikely to finish on time. The funds can only be spent after lawmakers accept a written explanation from the ministry.

According to the report, the military called a project meeting at the end of June to press the contractor, MiTAC Information Technology, to deliver early so that the whole case could be closed by the end of 2026. The company replied in writing on 7 July that it could not finish the fifth batch before the end of the year. The ministry says it has told the firm that every day of delay beyond 20 January 2027 will cost NT$1.278 million in penalties, close to seven times the daily penalty of about NT$190,000 for late delivery of the Hai Kun submarine.

The aircraft, developed by the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology and known in the army as the Capricorn, is a small helicopter-type drone weighing 25 kilograms, with a maximum take-off weight of 30 kilograms. The China Times listed a combat radius of 30 kilometres, a ceiling of about 1,500 metres, an endurance of 60 minutes and a top speed of about 64 km/h. It carries daylight and thermal cameras and sends live video to a forward command post, giving combined-arms and infantry battalions their own reconnaissance.

The delay is the latest change to a schedule that has already moved. The army first bought 100 of the drones, in 50 sets, for about NT$778 million under a programme set up for 2021 to 2023. When the second phase was budgeted in 2024, the plan was to receive 20 aircraft that year, 96 in 2025 and 85 in 2026. The 2026 budget book then cut the 2025 figure to 51 and raised the 2026 figure to 130, a shift the Liberty Times said might reflect limited production capacity. With both phases complete the fleet is meant to reach 301 drones.

Crewing has also been a concern. A legislative budget office review published in 2024 cited audit findings that nearly a quarter of the army's drone crew members had not obtained operator qualifications, half of them supervisors, and that by mid-2024 only 81 qualified operators were in place, about 88 percent of the requirement. The audit office and the budget office also reported that the drone sometimes overheated.

Since its debut in 2023 the Capricorn has become standard equipment for combined-arms battalions in major exercises and has been used to watch live-fire ranges for garrison infantry brigades. The new deadline means some units will wait into 2027 for their aircraft, a delay the ministry links directly to the military's own demand for a radio link that is harder to jam.