The Ministry of National Defense (MND) yesterday said the time has not yet come for the adoption of a voluntary enrollment system to replace the draft system for the recruitment of soldiers.
"The government has to increase the yearly defense budget by NT$100 billion if all of the existing 260,000 conscripts in the armed forces are to become professional soldiers," MND spokesman Major General Huang Sui-sheng (
"Besides, China has not renounced use of force against Taiwan. Under such circumstances, we need to maintain a force large enough to defend the country," Huang said. The number of Taiwanese the military estimates it needs to defend the country is for the moment 380,000, a figure combining both conscripts and enlistees.
Huang made the remarks yesterday at a regular press conference of the MND in response to inquiries from the media over the possibility of the military replacing the draft with enlistment as the way to recruit soldiers.
Huang said the MND is thinking in that direction, but he cited a long list of difficulties which he said the MND has found as to the proposed plan to recruit all the soldiers via enlistment.
One of the difficulties is the additional personnel cost that the MND estimates it will need to spend to replace all of the conscripts with professional soldiers. The extra cost is estimated to be around NT$100 billion a year.
"The best condition for us is to keep the current personnel recruitment system, which is a combination of conscription and enlistment," Huang said.
The conscription system is for the recruitment of soldiers, while the enlistment is for the enrollment of officers and non-commissioned officers.
"Most of the countries in the world adopt a similar system to ours in the recruitment of armed forces. There are only a few countries like the US, the United Kingdom and Japan, whose militaries rely solely on enlistment for the provision of manpower.
These countries are often without any immediate threat from an enemy," Huang said. "We are in a different situation. We feel constant military threats from China."
"Even if we wanted to replace all the conscripts with professional soldiers, we will not find enough young people who are interested in a military career. Our understanding of the current social conditions is that most of the young people do not like tough and boring jobs like in the military, no matter how high the pay they can get for the jobs," he said.
"There has also been a long-term prejudice existing among ordinary people against servicemen. They think only the bad boys will join the military. Such prejudice has been affecting us for quite a long period of time," he said.
Despite all the difficulties, Huang said the MND will seriously consider the possibility of replacing all the conscripts with professional soldiers, since the military will need more and more specialized personnel to handle highly sophisticated modern weapon systems.
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