As next year’s presidential election approaches, military enlistment practices have become an increasingly disputed political issue. According to birthrate and census statistics, the election’s 1.3 million first-time voters include 700,000 men of conscription age, so any change in the military service system could have broad implications.
However, the current policy of transitioning to an all-volunteer army is fraught with difficulties.
Setting aside the single issue of conscription versus recruitment, the key to resolving the issue is improving working conditions to make it easier for the armed services to attract talent.
Over the past 20 years, Taiwan’s armed forces have gone too far in trying to cut down on personnel. A series of plans were designed to create a leaner, meaner military. However, while the total number of military personnel has shrunk from 370,000 to about 200,000, military power has not been significantly improved, while the military’s public image has been damaged by various incidents. Reforms to the military service system have not had the desired effect.
As well as failing to improve efficiency, the reforms have even had a heavy impact on morale. While the forces have been made leaner, this has not been complemented by simpler and more efficient governance. Furthermore, troops are also often assigned to situations like disaster relief, which are a substantial burden on top of their normal duties. Trying to attract volunteers or even draftees to work on teams that have gone from lean to bare-bones is a futile effort.
An equally serious matter is that routine work for staff officers is burdensome. Aside from their regular duties of organizing military exercises and training, the quantity of official documentation and procedures has remained unchanged despite there being fewer staff. As a result, officers of all ranks spend excessive amounts of time processing paperwork.
This excessive work burden pressures some officers into leaving the armed forces early, causing a brain drain. Staff officers of all ranks in combat units, and even in higher-command units, are overwhelmed with clerical work. This is a misuse of talent and leads to a lack of job satisfaction.
As Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co chairman Morris Chang (張忠謀) once said: “The aims of restructuring include redesigning business workflows and organizational structures.”
For the armed forces, where slimming down and streamlining have been taken too far, adjusting staff officers’ workflows and organizational structures have been key tasks in reforming military affairs. The solution is to move away from the flawed notion that “efficiency” means one person doing the work of three. Instead, matters should be simplified by consolidating three tasks into one.
This means starting out from basic, yet crucial reforms such as delegating authority, simplifying paperwork, consolidating operations, cutting out miscellaneous duties and setting up more horizontal organizational structures. Only then will it be possible to free up overburdened military personnel, make the military profession a competitive career option and clear the way for moving from conscription to enlistment.
As regards conscription and recruitment, an important characteristic of the military’s human resources structure is the way in which higher and lower-ranking personnel might be grouped. In a tank crew, for example, the commander, who is responsible for handling high-tech equipment, and the gunner might be volunteers, while the relatively easier positions to train for — the loader and driver — are mostly filled by draftees. This arrangement takes cost and human resource demands into consideration.
Consider the all-volunteer US military, where new recruits are paid approximately NT$50,000 (US$1,626) a month. Although the rate of pay is on the low side relative to the average US salary, the US military is still able to attract plenty of recruits. The main reasons for this are the work environment and the sense of pride that comes from working with advanced technology.
Under the US military system, members of the US National Guard, which is a part-time force, usually train at the weekend and are called up during wartime. This type of “segmented” voluntary-service system allows training quality, budget costs and military reserves to be taken into consideration at the same time. It also combines features of conscription and recruitment. This is a system that Taiwan could consider adopting.
Given the issues with conscription and recruitment, focusing on reforms that streamline administration as well as reducing the number of personnel required could make the military an attractive place to work, just as the Civil Service Special Police Examination has become a “hot seller.” Thinking about how to achieve this would be more meaningful than staying entangled in the issue of which enlistment system to employ.
Su Tzu-yun is chief executive officer of the Center for Advanced Technology at Tamkang University.
Translated by Zane Kheir
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
As former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wrapped up his visit to the People’s Republic of China, he received his share of attention. Certainly, the trip must be seen within the full context of Ma’s life, that is, his eight-year presidency, the Sunflower movement and his failed Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, as well as his eight years as Taipei mayor with its posturing, accusations of money laundering, and ups and downs. Through all that, basic questions stand out: “What drives Ma? What is his end game?” Having observed and commented on Ma for decades, it is all ironically reminiscent of former US president Harry