The Ministry of National Defense (MND) yesterday made public a list of routine exercises that will be held this year as part of its efforts to promote military transparency in the Taiwan Strait.
The highlight on the list is the Han Kuang No. 18 exercise, which will take place between April and May, the MND said.
The Han Kuang No. 18 exercise will be the armed forces' largest of the year and will test a new joint-operation mechanism that the military has formed on an experimental basis to handle growing joint-operation needs in the battlefield of the future. The new mechanism will be tested through computer simulations and physical maneuvers.
The exercise will also test computer simulations of the forces that the military will need to defend the nation against in the year 2005.
The Sheng Chien No. 43 and Lien Yun No. 66 exercises will be held at the same time as the Han Kuang No. 18.
The Sheng Chien No. 43 exercise will basically be a missile test, but the MND did not make public what kind of missile will be tested during the exercise.
In the past, the Sheng Chien series of exercises were mainly tests of the Hawk air defense missile.
The Lien Yun No. 66 exercise will be a parachute landing drill.
The ministry did not provide information about where the three exercises will take place. They will integrate with 14 other routine exercises that the MND also made public yesterday. The MND has been holding the exercises for several years in an attempt to boost military transparency in the Taiwan Strait.
"This year the exercises are designed mainly to strengthen the troops' joint-operations and night-fighting capabilities," MND spokesman Major General Huang Sui-sheng (黃穗生) said.
Besides the training of the regulars, the military will hold the Tung Hsin No. 14 exercise in May to test the combat readiness of newly-formed reserve brigades. The Tung Hsin No. 14 will be launched at the same time as the Han Kuang No. 18, in order to test the ability of reserve troops to provide assistance to regular troops at a time of war.
The ability of the active and reserve forces to function together is considered to be lacking -- therefore the focus is on their integration in the planned exercises. Their joint-operations capability has, however, been improving in recent years after the military leadership realized the importance of such operations in the modern battlefield.
This year's routine exercises will also focus on the development of night-fighting capabilities, which are also lacking because of a dearth of equipment and experience in the area.
The army will, for instance, hold a physical exercise in June that will pit two combined arms brigades against each other. This will give the top brass clues as to how close combined arms brigades -- which in recent years have replaced divisions -- are to reaching their training goals for efficient fighting during both day and night.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching