The nation’s second squadron of Apache attack helicopters is likely to enter service later this year after the first squadron was commissioned last year by the Army Aviation and Special Forces Command, an army officer said yesterday.
After undergoing rigorous testing, the second Apache combat team is expected to be commissioned in the middle of this year, said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The launch of the first squadron has shown that the Apache helicopters are combat-ready, while the formation of the additional squadron means it has full combat and defense capabilities, he said.
Photo: Courtesy of the Military News Agency
The command’s 601st Brigade has been training personnel and upgrading its equipment since 2013, the command said, adding that after more than two years of training, one of the two Apache squadrons was commissioned in June last year and has since then contributed greatly to improving the army’s combat capability.
Taiwan in 2008 ordered 30 Boeing AH-64E Apache helicopters from the US for about NT$59.3 billion (US$2.01 billion at the current exchange rate), including personnel training and logistics, and took delivery of the aircraft from November 2013 to October 2014.
One of the helicopters was destroyed in April 2014 after it crashed during a training flight in Taoyuan.
The AH-64E is also known as a “tankbuster.” It is equipped with powerful target acquisition radar that is capable of 360-degree operation for up to 8km, and can simultaneously track up to 128 targets and engage the 16 most dangerous, the command said, adding that it carries 16 Hellfire missiles and can deploy them in less than 30 seconds.
In related news, the army has decided to start phasing out its Bell UH-1H helicopters by the end of this year, even though there are not enough Sikorsky UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters to replace them, an anonymous defense official said yesterday.
Although the military originally intended to replace the army’s aging UH-1H fleet with the 60 UH-60Ms it bought from the US, half of the Black Hawks were later allotted to other aviation services, the official said.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) each ordered the reassignment of 15 aircraft to the Air Rescue Group and the National Airborne Service Corps respectively, leaving only 30 Black Hawks for the army, the official said.
While the army has held off retiring the UH-1Hs, their ready rate and maintenance costs are no longer acceptable, the official said.
The army believes that the government should buy another 32 UH-60M helicopters from the US, if budget allows, the official said.
Taiwan from 1970 to 1976 built 118 UH-1H helicopters under license, meaning that the last batch of airframes are 42 years old, the official said.
The army intends to donate some of the phased-out aircraft to technical training schools, they added.
NO-LIMITS PARTNERSHIP: ‘The bottom line’ is that if the US were to have a conflict with China or Russia it would likely open up a second front with the other, a US senator said Beijing and Moscow could cooperate in a conflict over Taiwan, the top US intelligence chief told the US Senate this week. “We see China and Russia, for the first time, exercising together in relation to Taiwan and recognizing that this is a place where China definitely wants Russia to be working with them, and we see no reason why they wouldn’t,” US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines told a US Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Thursday. US Senator Mike Rounds asked Haines about such a potential scenario. He also asked US Defense Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has