The military proposed to dissolve its Combined Logistics Command, Reserve Command and Military Police Command to reduce its personnel by 75,000 to gradually realize President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) policy of transforming the military into an all-volunteer service.
Ma had said he wanted the military to implement a completely voluntary military service to replace the current compulsory service in four to six years, and also scale down military personnel to less than 200,000.
The Chinese-language Apple Daily reported yesterday that the military had decided to dissolve the three military units and only maintain the Army, the Navy and the Air Force.
The report said, however, that the proposal had met with criticism from officials who were likely to lose their jobs under the proposal.
The report said Chief of the General Staff General Huo Shou-yeh (霍守業) and Vice Minister of National Defense Lin Chen-yi (林鎮夷) had been busy communicating with various units over the proposed reduction of personnel.
The report said that the current 13,000 personnel of the Military Police Command would be reduced to less than 5,000 and be combined into the army.
Ministry spokeswoman Lisa Chih (池玉蘭) told the Taipei Times yesterday that “the military planned to complete the plans for a voluntary military service by the end of 2013, and to implement it in 2014.”
She said the military had not reached a conclusion on the reduction of military personnel as described in the report.
But she also said the Ministry of National Defense had received complaints and faced resistance over plans to downscale.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) said yesterday that a downsizing of the military would have an impact on national defense, which was in accordance with Ma’s policy of weakening Taiwan’s defense to please China.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater