Pan-greens slam blues' military plan

Pan-green lawmakers yesterday strongly criticized their pan-blue colleagues' proposal to reduce compulsory military service to three months, calling it "irresponsible."

At a public hearing at the legislature yesterday, lawmakers with the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) shot down the three-month service term proposed by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and People First Party (PFP) to attract young voters.

DPP Legislator Lee Wen-chung (李文忠) called the blue camp's proposal "irresponsible" and said it was not feasible at the moment.

The three-month service term was proposed as part of the blue camp's defense platform for the March 20 presidential election, which also involves the implementation of a volunteer soldier system within four years.

These two parts of the blue team's defense platform are supplementary to each other. Only if the military could recruit enough volunteers would the three-month service term become feasible.

The military has already launched an all-volunteer military system last year on an experimental basis. But the experiment was not successful. Over 600 volunteer soldiers were needed, but, so far, only one third of the positions have been filled.

"The blue camp's proposed volunteer system would cost the government NT$91.7 billion a year. This is just a rough estimate. We have not included other associated expenses," Lee said.

"The blue camp did not take into consideration all the objective conditions for the implementation of the system. Does the government have enough money to enforce the system? Do they know whether enough volunteer soldiers could be recruited?" he said.

TSU lawmaker Chen Chien-ming (陳建銘) said the blue team should seek to implement the three-month service term and all-volunteer military system in steps, rather than in one stride.

"Ironically, the blue team copied the three-month service term scheme from us [the TSU]. We proposed a similar scheme on May 4, 2002. The record is available from the legislature's archive," Chen said.

"The blue camp was then strongly opposed to the scheme. Some of their lawmakers called our idea `absurd' or `unconstitutional.' Now they have not only swallowed their words but also stolen our idea," he said.

"The service term can be cut only if the all-volunteer system could help the military find enough personnel to compensate for the loss of manpower due to the service term reduction," he said.

"The service term could be cut, for instance, to one year and two months if the military gets as many as 50,000 volunteer soldiers."

Lee said that while the blue camp proposed the three-month service term scheme, it did not tell the public how it would be implemented.

The current compulsory military service term is one year and ten months, but, starting from this year, it has been reduced to 20 months according to an administrative order from the Ministry of National Defense. It is not known how long the administrative order will be in effect.