A high-level Taiwan military delegation began an intensive round of talks with Pentagon officials Friday aimed at jump-starting apparently stalled efforts to acquire diesel submarines from the US and advancing the purchase of other weapons systems.
US officials hinted today that the visit might replace long-standing plans for a US team of defense officials and contractors to visit Taiwan to present a set of options for the eight submarines, which the George W. Bush administration agreed to sell Taiwan last year.
Headed by Vice Admiral Wang Li-shen (王立申), head of the planning department of the Ministry of National Defense, the group met Friday with Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia Peter Brookes, an ardent supporter of arms sales to Taiwan, plus Pentagon procurement and 3CI (command, control, communications and intelligence) specialists.
Officials are beginning to wonder about the value of the trip, since US and Taiwan military officials have other ways to communicate.
"Why go and arrange this formal trip to lay out all these proposals for them, when really we've been consulting with them on the proposals from the beginning," a US official said.
"I haven't heard anybody talk about a trip in a long time," the official said.
For months, the trip had been considered the central event needed to make the submarine sale happen. Among other potential roadblocks, US officials are upset over reports that Taiwan is balking about paying the costs of the early steps that must be taken before the vessels are built.
"There are substantial up-front costs" associated with the sale, a US defense official said. This is because the ships might have to be designed and build from scratch, since the US stopped building nuclear submarines in the 1950s and the US Navy has no such submarines in its fleet.
Some US officials say privately that unless Taiwan pays these costs, the sale may be cancelled or delayed.
However, in a more optimistic development, a US official told the Taipei Times that Wang and his group are expected to visit a major US naval base while in the Washington area next week.
The delegation is tentatively scheduled to visit the Norfolk Naval Station in Norfolk, Virginia, the headquarters of the US Atlantic Fleet, an unusual visit for such a delegation.
But the heart of the Washington trip will come tomorrow and Tuesday, when the delegation holds talks at the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the division responsible for all US arms sales to other countries. The group will meet with Edward Ross, who is responsible for all Asian, Middle Eastern and North African sales.
The discussions, which are called security cooperation talks, will deal with "previously acquired Taiwan programs and other areas of security cooperation required for Taiwan's legitimate self-defense needs," said one US defense official.
Unlike the traditional annual arms sales discussions, which Bush eliminated in April last year, the current talks will deal only with weapons systems and services that the US has already agreed to supply, said a defense official.
In the earlier annual procedure, a Taiwan defense team usually went to Washington in the autumn with its arms shopping list, and returned in April to find out what the administration had agreed to sell that year.
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