What the Indo-Pacific Build-up Means for South Asia

Pramudith D Rupasinghe

East Asia’s arms race is no longer a distant story for South Asia. In August 2026, the first two new-build F-16V Block 70 fighters left Fort Worth for Taiwan’s Chiayi Air Base, the opening delivery of a 66-jet order. Four months earlier, Japan scrapped the rules that had confined its arms exports to five non-combat categories, opening the door to selling warships, missiles and fighters abroad.

Read separately, these look like Pacific affairs: one concerns deterrence across the Taiwan Strait, the other a domestic policy debate in Tokyo. Read together, they describe a single trend. Washington’s partners in the Western Pacific are hardening their own defences while building industrial and political networks that stretch westward, into the Indian Ocean.

For South Asia, the consequences run along three tracks. The first is the balance of air power, where the F-16 is a familiar and politically loaded aircraft. The second is the arms market, where Japan is now a potential supplier. The third is strategic alignment, where every capital from New Delhi to Colombo faces sharper choices between Washington, Beijing and Tokyo.

Taiwan’s Block 70

The first two Block 70 jets, tail numbers 6727 and 6728, departed Fort Worth on 17 August 2026 for a three-leg ferry flight via Hawaii and Guam (Migflug, Focus Taiwan). They are part of the ‘Peace Phoenix Soaring’ programme, ordered in 2019 for roughly USD7.75 billion. Taiwan budgeted NT$247.2 billion for the purchase between 2020 and 2026.

The programme was meant to start delivering around 2023 and finish by the end of 2026. Production problems at Lockheed Martin’s restarted Greenville line pushed that back by years. Even with a planned rate of four aircraft a month, finishing all 66 this year was always ambitious (AirData News).

What the jets add matters more than when they arrive. The Block 70 carries an Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar, new mission computer and electronic-warfare suite, conformal fuel tanks and a longer structural life. Taiwan already finished upgrading about 140 older F-16A/B Block 20 jets to the same ‘V’ standard in December 2023. Once the new order is complete, Taiwan will field more than 200 F-16Vs, one of the largest Viper fleets outside the United States (US).