The US will approve the sale of 12 P-3C Orion anti-submarine aircraft before year’s end, a newspaper reported yesterday, quoting a military official.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily quoted Navy Admiral Wang Li-shen (王立申) as saying that the US would approve the sale of 12 P-3Cs before the year’s end, and the P-3Cs would join the navy in 2012.
US naval personnel recently inspected facilities at an airbase in Taoyuan to see if it was capable of receiving the P-3Cs, the daily quoted Wang as saying.
Wang said that as the budget for the 12 P-3Cs was large, the navy was not buying Harpoon missiles, which are carried by the aircraft, but would share the 60 Harpoon missiles the US agreed to sell to the Air Force early this week.
The Apple Daily said Washington’s upcoming sale of the 12 P-3Cs indicated the US has ended the freeze on arms sales to Taipei.
The US — Taiwan’s sole supplier of advanced weaponry — is believed to have imposed the freeze on arms sales last year, although the policy has never been confirmed by administration officials.
Analysts have said the move was an attempt to gain favor with China ahead of US President George W. Bush’s trip to the Games.
Taiwan would benefit from more integrated military strategies and deployments if the US and its allies treat the East China Sea, the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea as a “single theater of operations,” a Taiwanese military expert said yesterday. Shen Ming-shih (沈明室), a researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said he made the assessment after two Japanese military experts warned of emerging threats from China based on a drill conducted this month by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Eastern Theater Command. Japan Institute for National Fundamentals researcher Maki Nakagawa said the drill differed from the
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