The military will start installation of a C4ISR (command, control, communication, computer, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) system next year -- a multi-year project costing an estimated NT$50 billion.
Next year's budget allocation sent to the legislature for the C4ISR project is over NT$3 billion to begin. The allocation is part of the proposed 2004 defense budget delivered to the legislature in recent weeks.
The budget is to be divided equally among the army, navy and air force. Each each share equals about NT$900 million and much smaller allocations will be earmarked for use by minor military branches, such as the Chun-shan Institute of Science and Technology and National Defense University.
The C4ISR project, code-named "Posheng," is aimed at integrating different weapons systems of the three services by building data links between them. The goal is to share information in real time.
Minister of National Defense Tang Yao-ming (
"We launch the project mainly because of a lack of information-sharing between the different weapons systems of the three services. We bought too many weapon systems from abroad and now we need to integrate them," Tang said.
The Posheng project is to be built on the basis of what is called the Link-16 system, which is used by the US to hook-up weapons platforms across the services.
The US approved the sale of the Link-16 system to Taiwan over two years ago and installation of the system has taken a full two years because the military to date has reserved only a small portion for the Posheng project, which was only enough for research and evaluation.
Next year's defense budget will see a big increase in Posheng project spending. Such investment will continue for a number of years at a total cost of nearly NT$50 billion.
The system can provide links that traverse the air, the sea and the ground. A warplane of the air force, for instance, is unable to share real-time information with most surface and ground weapons platforms, but that will no longer be a problem when the system goes online.
Not all major weapons systems of the three services are to be incorporated into the system because of budgetary constraints.
Initial recommendations by the US were to put all major weapons systems of the three services into the C4ISR system, but the cost would be as high as NT$100 billion.
The military chose an affordable alternative -- to the exclusion of some weapons systems.
The domestically-built IDF is one of the items to be excluded from the system and the locally-built Chenkung-class frigate is to be included, but only a few of the seven operational Chenkung frigates are to be equipped with the new data links.
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