If anyone had doubts about Taiwan’s ability to defend itself, a report released by the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recently is sure to turn those into nightmares.
The agency’s assessment painted a bleak portrait of Taiwan’s Air Force, with quasi-obsolete Mirage 2000s and F-5s likely to be mothballed, while the aging fleet of F-16s and Indigenous Defense Fighters are in dire need of refurbishing. In fact, even if those models were upgraded, their limited capabilities put into question Taiwan’s ability to achieve air superiority against the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), which in recent years has rapidly transformed and modernized — thanks largely to sales and technology transfers from Russia.
The report’s message is therefore loud and clear, if not self-evident: Taiwan will need, soon, advanced fighter aircraft in sufficient quantity to consolidate one of the principal pillars in its defense strategy: denying its airspace to the PLAAF.
The Air Force’s dwindling resources, however, are only part of the problem. As the DIA states in its report, Taiwan’s aircraft will only be effective if airports and runways are sufficiently protected — and that, too, remains a big if. China has greatly enhanced the quantity, sophistication and accuracy of its ballistic and cruise missiles, which means that the PLA has enough missiles to overwhelm Taiwan’s air defense systems. As the Project 2049 think tank, discussing Taiwan’s Quadrennial Defense Review, noted last year, by “employing runway penetrating submunitions in SRBM [short-range ballistic missile] attacks against Taiwan’s airbases, the PLA’s 2nd Artillery can prevent Taiwan’s Air Force from defending its skies, which raises the question of the aircrafts’ wartime utility.” In other words, the aircraft could be rendered unusable before an actual invasion.
Aside from hardening hangars and the ability to quickly repair runways, Taiwan’s airbases rely mostly on PAC-2 and PAC-3 missile interceptors for protection against a missile attack. Not only are the missiles costly (about US$9 million each), but the two-to-one ratio to ensure the interception of an incoming SRBM makes it doubly so. Still, the bulk of US arms sales intended for Taiwan in recent years — at least in dollar terms —consists of such missiles. The PAC-3 missile fire units and 330 missiles approved by the US government in 2008 are scheduled for delivery in August 2014. That is more than four years from now, a period during which the 2nd Artillery and the PLAAF will continue to widen the military imbalance in the Taiwan Strait.
The expensive PAC-3 sales make sense only if they are intended to protect systems that are critical to Taiwan’s defense. Aside from command-and-control, those systems are the Air Force. This means that absent substantial investments in the modernization of its fleet of aircraft — more advanced F-16s or some alternative — Taiwan would be spending billions of dollars on a missile defense system that, in the end, would be close to worthless. Washington didn’t need the DIA report to know this, and yet it continues to stall requests for F-16s. Should it continue to do this, it could be accused of selling an old lady a prohibitively expensive baseball bat to protect herself against a squad of Mafiosi equipped with tanks and machine guns.
Taiwan needs birds. Without them, everything else is theater.
In the first year of his second term, US President Donald Trump continued to shake the foundations of the liberal international order to realize his “America first” policy. However, amid an atmosphere of uncertainty and unpredictability, the Trump administration brought some clarity to its policy toward Taiwan. As expected, bilateral trade emerged as a major priority for the new Trump administration. To secure a favorable trade deal with Taiwan, it adopted a two-pronged strategy: First, Trump accused Taiwan of “stealing” chip business from the US, indicating that if Taipei did not address Washington’s concerns in this strategic sector, it could revisit its Taiwan
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) challenges and ignores the international rules-based order by violating Taiwanese airspace using a high-flying drone: This incident is a multi-layered challenge, including a lawfare challenge against the First Island Chain, the US, and the world. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) defines lawfare as “controlling the enemy through the law or using the law to constrain the enemy.” Chen Yu-cheng (陳育正), an associate professor at the Graduate Institute of China Military Affairs Studies, at Taiwan’s Fu Hsing Kang College (National Defense University), argues the PLA uses lawfare to create a precedent and a new de facto legal
Chile has elected a new government that has the opportunity to take a fresh look at some key aspects of foreign economic policy, mainly a greater focus on Asia, including Taiwan. Still, in the great scheme of things, Chile is a small nation in Latin America, compared with giants such as Brazil and Mexico, or other major markets such as Colombia and Argentina. So why should Taiwan pay much attention to the new administration? Because the victory of Chilean president-elect Jose Antonio Kast, a right-of-center politician, can be seen as confirming that the continent is undergoing one of its periodic political shifts,
Taiwan’s long-term care system has fallen into a structural paradox. Staffing shortages have led to a situation in which almost 20 percent of the about 110,000 beds in the care system are vacant, but new patient admissions remain closed. Although the government’s “Long-term Care 3.0” program has increased subsidies and sought to integrate medical and elderly care systems, strict staff-to-patient ratios, a narrow labor pipeline and rising inflation-driven costs have left many small to medium-sized care centers struggling. With nearly 20,000 beds forced to remain empty as a consequence, the issue is not isolated management failures, but a far more
RSS