Legislators from both major political parties have voiced strong opposition to President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) plan to trim military personnel down to about 170,000 over the next three years by shifting from a conscripted to a volunteer force.
Ma has been pushing for the program, known as Yong Ku (勇固), to achieve the goal of all-volunteer armed forces by the end of 2018 by offering increased pay and other incentives aimed at attracting Taiwanese to enlist and become career soldiers.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chen Chen-hsiang (陳鎮湘) said the government has halved Taiwan’s armed forces over the past decade, from about 450,000 in the latter part of the 1990s to a total of about 210,500 last year.
“Numerous military units were downsized, and jobs were cut. This is very worrying, because many officers were forced to retire. This dealt severe blows to morale,” Chen said at an event organized by the Taipei-based Society for Strategic Studies on Saturday, adding that there is resistance and dissent in the armed forces toward the downsizing project.
“These problems will worsen if Ma goes ahead with the plan. We might see the disintegration of our military’s operational and combat capabilities,” Chen said.
“I’m not trying to frighten our citizens, but it is a possibility that tanks are unable to move from army bases and warships are unable to sail from docks,” Chen added.
Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) had similar concerns.
“If Ma rams through the downsizing program, the military will be unable to adjust and integrate staff work assignments and postings. It will lead to deficiencies, and many units of the armed forces might even lack the personnel to manage and operate military hardware,” he said.
He said the plan had already had a negative impact on the military’s chain of command, and officer training programs had been severely compromised.
“Our procurement and upgrading of weapons in recent years has been insufficient and not meeting our national defense needs,” Tsai said.
Tsai and Chen, along with other legislators, proposed the postponement of the implementation of an all-volunteer military at the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee meeting last week.
Responding to the concerns of legislators and other officials, Ma said he still intends to realize the goal of an all-volunteer force, ordering the military to make necessary adjustments.
“I look forward to seeing the Ministry of National Defense coordinating and carrying out upcoming military drills. These will enable the evaluation of the structure of our armed forces, and to check and see if there are sufficient soldiers and officers. Then adjustments can be made as necessary,” Ma said at the event on Saturday.
“The Yong Ku plan is within the overall framework of reforming Taiwan’s military. We aim to streamline and modernized our armed forces, reduced in scale, but improved in quality, while retaining their strong combat capabilities,” he said.
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
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
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