Beijing's coast guard has expanded its Scarborough Shoal patrol cadence to near-daily presence through June, according to gCaptain vessel tracking, a shift from the intermittent sweeps that characterized the shoal's patrol pattern since the 2023 standoff. President Lai Ching-te, addressing military cadets at a commissioning ceremony in Kaohsiung on June 30, warned that Beijing's approach to Taiwan runs through exactly this kind of incremental presence-building rather than a single decisive move, telling graduates that "the tools of annexation are patience and proximity." Lai's own defense ministry is simultaneously fielding a KMT-led legislative push for several billion NT dollars in additional drone procurement, a bid backed by lawmakers who have spent two years cutting the defense budget lines Lai's administration proposed. Retired Admiral Lee Hsi-min, the former chief of the general staff who authored Taiwan's "porcupine strategy" in 2017, told Semafor this week that Beijing currently lacks the amphibious lift and logistics base to conquer Taiwan outright, a capability gap he places at three to five years.

The admiral's timeline is the operative fact, not the reassurance it is being read as. A three-to-five-year capability gap is not a ceiling on pressure, it is a budget for it, and Scarborough Shoal is where Beijing is spending the down payment: normalizing a patrol posture in the Philippines before it needs to normalize one in the Taiwan Strait. The KMT's drone bill, which the Legislative Yuan is scheduled to take up in committee the week of July 6, will be the next test of whether Taipei's opposition treats procurement as leverage against Lai or as capability against Beijing. Either way, the answer arrives before the admiral's window closes.