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Military forces need a shake-up
By Wang Jyh-perng ¤ý§ÓÄP
While delivering a speech during a symposium for military officials at the
National Defense University on Nov. 3, President Ma Ying-jeou (°¨^¤E) reiterated
that Taiwan¡¦s strategy should be to develop a military that is strong, skilled
and specialized, despite being small, and to deter China using asymmetric and
innovative warfare.
However, the constant repetition of these slogans cannot hide the fact that
Taiwan¡¦s military continues to be weakened. If we take a look at national
defense developments over the last two years, we see that the US has become more
sensitive when it comes to selling arms to Taiwan, while Ma has not delivered on
his pre-election promises in relation to national defense policy.
In a commentary by Michael Chase, an associate research professor at the Naval
War College in the US published by the US-based Jamestown Foundation on March 5,
Chase stated clearly that he believed Taiwan¡¦s military must make three
important changes, as soon as possible. He said the first was to rethink our
national defense strategies and develop innovative asymmetric warfare
capabilities in response to the ever-growing military imbalance between Taiwan
and China. The second was that Taiwan should strengthen its disaster relief
capabilities. Last, he felt Taiwan must invest vast amounts of money to
establish a military enlistment system.
Let us take a look at Ma¡¦s election promises in regard to national defense
policy. So far, the national defense budget has not been lowered to 3 percent of
GDP as Ma promised, while the military enlistment system must be postponed
because of a lack of adequate funding and suitable candidates. The national
defense budget makes it impossible to maintain the 4:3:3 proportion between
military staff, operations and investments.
Furthermore, ongoing downsizing has resulted in uncertainty and constant changes
in the structure of national defense organization, causing the different
military branches to fight with each other for resources. Ma has not delivered
on even one of his election promises and it does not look like he will during
the remainder of his term in office.
Ma says asymmetric warfare means the active development of feasible ways to
strike at an enemy¡¦s fatal weaknesses. However, a look at the six items the US
sold Taiwan in October 2008 for US$6.46 billion and the five items sold in
January for US$6.39 billion, shows that these deals were all secured by the
military before Ma came to power. In addition, these items barely help maintain
Taiwan¡¦s existing defense capabilities, as there were no forward-looking items
that could help establish a future deterrent.
Ma continues to ask the US to sell Taiwan F-16C/D fighter aircraft, but he is
only really doing this for show and some experts and academics have criticized
him for this in the past.
A recent example is US military expert Richard Fisher who said in February that
even if the US government decided to sell F-16C/D fighter aircraft to Taiwan,
the deterrence effect would only be temporary. Fisher also said that over the
next decade, China will be able to gain fifth-generation fighters with much
stronger capabilities than F-16s and that Taiwan should think about building up
more forward-looking military capabilities. Mei Fu-hsing (±ö´_¿³), director of the
US-based Taiwan Security Analysis Center, has also published an article asking
whether the Ma administration is using the US¡¦ pending military arms sales as
bargaining chips.
The best example of how money is being wasted can be seen from the 30 Apache
helicopters and 60 Black Hawk helicopters that were purchased, an excessive
number, while it was impossible to buy specialized aircraft for search and
rescue operations instead.
As far as non-traditional security is concerned, Typhoon Megi, which didn¡¦t even
make landfall in Taiwan, still caused severe damage and the loss of many lives.
Airborne special forces mobilized large numbers of ground troops to provide
assistance and the navy also sent out minehunter ships and Knox-class ships to
assist in underwater and surface searches.
These rescue efforts were very costly and very labor and time consuming. Yet
they were still criticized. The main reason for this criticism was that the
equipment, capabilities and training were not designed with disaster relief in
mind.
However, when facing future environmental changes around the globe and the more
severe and more frequent disasters that could result from these changes, we will
have to rely on large amounts of military manpower and capabilities. Last year,
the National Defense Report listed disaster prevention and rescue as a central
mission for the military. However, this is very difficult at the moment, given
current abilities.
Therefore, the military must be able to relate to different types and levels of
operation. They need to start by establishing specialized equipment and
capabilities that can be used interchangeably during both war and peace times.
Apart from increasing disaster relief training, they also need to look at their
skills and limitations in a pragmatic way. They should also think about merging
national defense with diplomacy from the viewpoints of humanitarian aid and
multilateral relations and come up with modes of mutual aid assistance that can
be implemented quickly between different countries during military emergencies.
Wang Jyh-perng is an associate research fellow at the
Association for Managing Defense and Strategies.
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