Taiwan's army trims artillery navigation buy as HIMARS and M109A7 bring their own

Taiwan's army has scaled back a plan to replace its ageing artillery position and azimuth determining systems, cutting the buy from 61 sets to 54 and trimming about NT$80 million from the budget, the Liberty Times reported on 16 October 2026. The army has sent a revised overall acquisition plan to the Ministry of National Defense for review.

The change follows criticism in the Legislative Yuan, where lawmakers questioned whether the programme duplicated equipment Taiwan is already buying and wasted public money. According to the report, the ministry ordered a rolling review of the requirement, and the army then offered to remove configurations that overlap with newer, digitised weapons.

Position and azimuth determining systems act as a navigation reference for guns. After a battery moves to a new firing position, the kit lets crews quickly fix their three-dimensional coordinates and firing direction, which is central to the shoot-and-move tactics artillery units rely on to survive counter-battery fire.

The army's current systems are bolt-on units. The French-made ULISS-30 entered service in 1997 and, after 29 years, suffers from age and discontinued spare parts, while the US-made SPAN-7 has a low readiness rate. Those problems led the army to budget NT$880 million for 61 replacement sets.

The readiness concerns are long-standing. A 2020 government audit report found that 15 of 17 SPAN-7 sets, bought under a plan approved in 2006 for about NT$183.6 million, were damaged, and faulted the army's maintenance and logistics planning for both the SPAN-7 and the 47 ULISS-30 sets acquired in 1997.

Lawmakers argued that the main systems Taiwan is now buying from the United States make part of that requirement unnecessary. The M142 HIMARS rocket launcher and the M109A7 self-propelled howitzer leave the factory with military-grade inertial navigation and GPS built in, so they do not need a separate survey vehicle to orient their fire. Legislators asked for the budget to be cut and partly frozen.

Both platforms sit at the centre of Taiwan's special arms budget. An Executive Yuan report to the legislature in May 2026 listed the first batch of letters of offer at about NT$295 billion, including roughly NT$159.7 billion for HIMARS and NT$80.7 billion for 60 M109A7 howitzers, with the howitzers scheduled to arrive from 2030.

A senior military official told the Liberty Times that the army removed the positioning systems planned for about three battalions of HIMARS and M109A7 guns, a reduction of six sets. A further set was dropped after a force-structure review found that an artillery company on an outlying island no longer needed independent high-end survey equipment following a change in its task organisation.

Together the two changes remove seven sets and lower the programme to NT$800 million. The military acknowledged that the newest guns carry their own navigation, but said large numbers of towed howitzer and mortar units on the main island and outlying islands cannot be replaced quickly and still depend on external positioning gear when they disperse in wartime.

The officials presented the revised plan as both an answer to legislative oversight and a practical way to digitise conventional artillery units that will keep serving alongside HIMARS and the M109A7 for years. The ministry has not said when its review of the amended acquisition plan will be completed.