The compulsory military service term will be shortened to one year within five years, marking the greatest change in the conscription system in decades, defense sources said yesterday.
As the service term is to be shortened drastically, the military will enhance at the same time the training of reserve troops, aiming to keep them ready for combat until they are relieved of their duty of defending the country at the age of 40.
It means that reserve troops, conscripts who have served out their compulsory-service term, would receive more recalls for training in the future.
The service term for conscripts has been changed several times during the past two decades but not to such a great extent as the one in five years' time.
The term was three years before the 1980s and was later shortened to two years, staying like that until the late 1990s.
It was first reduced to one year and ten months three years ago. Starting from next year, it will be shortened by two more months.
The DPP is playing a large role in the reduction of the military service term for conscripts, making it one of its first and most important defense policy priorities.
The Ministry of National Defense was initially reluctant to cooperate, but changed its mind after the DPP came into power three years ago.
Over the past three years, the ministry has carefully studied defense reforms proposed by the DPP and is starting to move in directions it used to reject.
The one-year service term, though not initiated by the defense ministry, is now policy that must be enforced before 2008.
The ministry worried at first that shortening the service term would weaken the strength of the armed forces.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods