An Integrated Cyber Deterrence and Active Defense for Nations - A Case Study for Taiwan with Learnings from Ukraine's Battlefields

Authors Note:

General David H. Petraeus, US Army (Ret.) recently had a masterful discussion with Jason Hsu of Hudson Institute about what the war in Ukraine has revealed about the future of warfare, and what these lessons mean for Taiwanese security. While listening to this, the author was genuinely curious how the same principles can be applied to the cyber infrastructure already under constant barrage of attack in Taiwan, and similar threats to other nation state digital infrastructure.

The original video titled “What Taiwan Can Learn from Ukraine’s Battlefield Experience”, is available here: https://youtu.be/nkPW2Ea-yeg

During the course of the conversation, General Petraeus, while establishing the thesis that, Taiwan’s best defense is to ensure deterrence never fails, learning from Ukraine’s war by rapidly transforming its defense posture, embracing asymmetric capabilities, hardening resilience, and preparing society for a prolonged and high-tech conflict, all while avoiding unnecessary provocation.

Key Lessons for Taiwan from General Petraeus

1. Deterrence Above All: Deterrence in Ukraine failed due to insufficient preparation, delayed international support, and adversary miscalculations. For Taiwan, deterrence must be “rock solid” through visible, credible capabilities and political will.
2. Transform Force Structure: Move from a few large, expensive, vulnerable systems to massive numbers of unmanned, increasingly algorithmically piloted systems (land, sea, air, cyber, space). Strengthen counter-drone, counter-missile, and counter-air capabilities.
3. Asymmetric Warfare & Whole-of-Society Defense: Learn from Ukraine’s innovation, speed, and battlefield adaptation (e.g., millions of drones annually, unmanned maritime strikes, civilian tech mobilization). Involve entire society, civil defense, reserves, tech industry, in resilience and innovation.
4. Resilience & Stockpiling Prepare for blockade or early isolation: Stockpile munitions, fuel, critical supplies. Diversify and secure energy sources (reduce 90% LNG import dependency). Harden communications, create redundant, sovereign capabilities.
5. Connectivity & Tech Mobilization Build domestic solutions for secure, resilient comms (e.g., satellite constellations, alternatives to Starlink). Harness Taiwan’s tech giants (TSMC, AI chipmakers) for defense applications.
6. Institutionalize Learning Send Taiwanese teams to Ukraine to observe, absorb, and apply lessons. Set up formalized “lessons learned” and rapid innovation pipelines.

Strategic & Geopolitical Context

• China is watching closely, and aiding Russia’s military-industrial complex.
• The U.S.-China relationship must avoid confrontation but maintain credible deterrence.
• Actions in one theater (e.g., Ukraine, Middle East) affect perceptions and deterrence in others.
• Economic decoupling is unrealistic; “de-risking” is the viable approach.

Petraeus’s Practical Guidance for Taiwan

• Increase defense budget (goal 3–3.5% GDP) with parliamentary unity.
• Expand training, especially reserves; extend active service.
• Prioritize innovation, speed, and adaptability over bureaucracy.
• Make adversaries believe “Not today” every day.

Takeaway

Taiwan must adopt Ukraine’s culture of rapid, bottom-up battlefield innovation, shift to a dispersed, unmanned, resilient defense model, and prepare the whole society for sustained resistance, while reinforcing U.S. and allied deterrence to prevent war from starting at all.

Inspiration for Cyber Approach

Deterrence in cyber is built, not declared.

• Deterrence in cyber is built, not declared. It rests on visible capability, credible will, and deliberate signaling, so an adversary concludes “not today.”
• Transform the defense, don’t just harden it. Shift from a few “exquisite” tools to mass, automated, and adaptive defenses that raise attacker cost at scale.
• Make your terrain a ‘hellscape’ for attackers. Deception, canaries, moving‑target defenses, blast‑radius controls, and fast containment turn every intrusion into a trap.
• Plan for a long war. Stockpile capacity (people, tech, bandwidth), pre‑negotiate surge agreements, and exercise restoration so you can fight, fix, and function under sustained pressure.

Considering the Decisive Deterrent mindset, we can apply similar thesis to cybersecurity readiness on how to deter, absorb, and out‑innovate a persistent, prolonged, and very real cyber campaign against Taiwan (and any operator that would be targeted alongside it).

The Threat Reality for Cyber

Expect a blended campaign: long‑term pre‑positioning in IT/OT/5G, supply‑chain compromise, wipers/ransomware for disruption, DDoS on telecom and media, credential‑theft at scale, SaaS tenant abuse, cloud control‑plane attacks, and continuous information ops (deepfakes, spoofed gov/comms). Assume simultaneous hits on identity, DNS, and a few “crown‑jewel” apps to induce national‑level friction.

Strategic Framework: Integrated Cyber Deterrence

1. Capability – demonstrate control coverage (identity, endpoint, network, SaaS, cloud, OT), fast containment, and resilient recovery.
2. Will – executive ownership, clear thresholds for action (account lock, segmentation, takedown requests), and public‑private surge posture.
3. Signaling – publish minimum baselines, run public exercises, attribute responsibly with partners, and visibly fix faster than they can break.

Operational Pillars (mapped to the battlefield lessons)

1) Transform the Architecture (as Ukraine did with unmanned mass drone based defense capability)

• Identity‑first Zero Trust: phishing‑resistant MFA (FIDO2), conditional access, step‑up auth, just‑in‑time/just‑enough admin, privileged access workstations, continuous device posture checks.
• Micro‑segmentation & blast‑radius design: contain compromise by default (per‑app, per‑service access; east‑west controls both on‑prem and cloud).
• SaaS & Cloud control‑plane hardening: SSPM/CSPM/CIEM with guardrails; separate prod vs. admin identities; break‑glass only via HSM‑backed flows.
• OT/IoT isolation: tiered zones, unidirectional gateways where feasible, strict vendor access, protocol allow‑lists, and rapid “safe‑state” procedures.

2) Massive Automation & Sensing

• Everywhere telemetry: endpoint (EDR/XDR), identity, DNS, proxy, mail, SaaS, cloud, and OT collectors pushed into a fusion lake.
• SOAR playbooks for the 20 most likely incidents (credential theft, token replay, SaaS data exfil, webshell, BEC, wiper/ransomware, DDoS, supply‑chain alert).
• Continuous threat hunting with hypothesis‑driven sweeps and detections tuned to living‑off‑the‑land.

3) “Hellscape” for Attackers (active defense, within the law)

• Deception fabric: decoy servers, honey‑credentials, honey‑tokens in code/repos/SaaS, beaconing documents, canary domains, instrumented to alert at first touch.
• Moving‑target defenses: rotating service accounts, ephemeral credentials, port knocking, dynamic app paths, periodic golden‑AMI regeneration.
• Choke points: egress allow‑lists; outbound DNS/HTTP only via inspected gateways; auto‑quarantine of anomalous identities or devices.
• Abuse‑resistant auth: token binding, short token lifetimes, conditional refresh, impossible‑travel checks.

4) Resilience, Stockpiles & Sustainment

• Backup you can bet your life on: offline/immutable copies, frequent restore drills for full apps (not just files), and measured RTO/RPO.
• Surge capacity: pre‑negotiated DDoS scrubbing, CDN burst, alt‑DNS resolvers, spare SASE licenses, overflow SOC capacity (MDR), and IR retainers.
• Out‑of‑band comms: pre‑distributed contact trees, incident bridges with MFA, and a non‑corporate channel if IdP is down.
• Golden builds: signed base images/firmware, secure boot, and automated redeploy to “flush” persistent access.

5) Supply Chain & Software Assurance

• SBOM/VEX intake from vendors; contract clauses for N‑hour incident notification and emergency patch SLAs.
• Build‑system security: secrets scanning, code signing, SLSA‑aligned pipelines, and environment isolation for AI/ML artifacts.
• Third‑party access: tenant‑to‑tenant isolation, PAW for vendor admins, and time‑boxed, just‑in‑time access.

6) Whole‑of‑Society Cyber Defense

• Civic/industry mobilization: telecoms, cloud, content platforms, ISACs/CERT coordinate on shared indicators, takedowns, and traffic filtering.
• Citizen‑level measures: national phishing/reporting app, alerting for scams/deepfakes, and crisis comms channels with verified handles.
• Cyber civil reserve: vetted volunteers, universities, and big‑tech surge teams on call for analysis and engineering.

7) Intelligence, Attribution & Lawful Consequence

• Threat intel fusion with cross‑gov sharing; pre‑approved pathways to request TTP disruptions, domain sinkholes, and botnet takedowns.
• Measured exposure: periodic, evidence‑backed advisories revealing tradecraft,raising attacker costs without revealing defensive crown jewels.

8) Train Like You’ll Fight (and for months)

• Quarterly executive tabletops, cross‑sector exercises (wiper + DDoS + BEC + deepfake scenario), and annual full restore for at least 2 tier‑1 services.
• Purple teaming and breach‑and‑attack simulation to validate controls; publish remediation deadlines and hit them.

Stage wise Action Plan

Stage I

• Stand up an Incident Command playbook (roles, legal, PR, gov liaisons).
• Validate immutable backups and perform one full‑app restore drill.
• Deploy a deception starter kit (canary creds/files/URLs) in identity, servers, code repos, and SaaS.
• Lock down IdP: FIDO2 for admins, disable legacy auth, enforce conditional access, and ring‑fence privileged identities with PAWs.

Stage II

• Pilot micro‑segmentation for one critical app; implement strict egress filtering.
• Onboard DDoS/CDN scrubbing and alt‑DNS; test failover.
• Turn on SOAR automations for top incidents; measure mean time to contain (MTTC).
• Execute a joint telecom–cloud–CERT exercise (DDoS + DNS tampering).

Stage III

• Executive tabletop with deepfake/rumor‑control injects; pre‑bunk messages and verification flows.
• Supplier tabletop focused on SBOM/rapid patch; enforce N‑hour notice clauses.
• Full reimage of a non‑prod env from golden builds to validate rapid “flush & restore.”

Timebound Objectives & Signals (Deterrence Without Provocation)

• Coverage: >95% EDR, >98% MFA (100% for admins), 100% egress via inspected gateways.
• Speed: MTTD < 15 min on priority events; MTTC < 60 min for identity takeovers; critical patch SLA < 7 days.
• Resilience: 2 tier‑1 systems fully restored in < 4 hours in live drills.
• Signaling: publish a national cyber baseline, expand bug bounty, run public cyber range events, and issue periodic joint advisories with partners.

AI‑Enabled Threats & Defenses

• Threats: faster phishing, password spraying at scale, convincing deepfakes, LLM prompt‑injection against internal copilots, data leakage through SaaS AI.
• Defenses: AI copilots for SOC triage, content authenticity/cryptographic signing for public comms, model isolation for internal AI, red‑teaming for LLM apps, and strict data loss controls (DSPM/DLP) in AI features.

Governance & Legal Lines

• No “hacking back.” Use lawful active defense: deception, telemetry, takedown requests, and law‑enforcement cooperation. Pre‑clear crisis authorities (procurement, data sharing, rapid contracting) to prevent delays.

Apply Petraeus’s logic to cyberspace: prevent failure of deterrence by showing unmistakable capacity to absorb, adapt, and recover at speed, while making every attacker step expensive and noisy. Transform the architecture, mobilize the ecosystem, and rehearse restoration until it’s muscle memory.

That’s how you keep the adversary saying, every morning, “not today.”