China’s participation in the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) military exercises might be improving Beijing’s ability to launch an invasion of Taiwan, a US expert said.
Reports from Honolulu said that a “big focus” of the naval maneuvers now under way is on how to land attack troops from amphibious ships and via helicopter.
“The American strategy of mil-mil [military-to-military] engagement with China is not only failing, it is a threat to US security interests,” said Richard Fisher, Asian military affairs expert at the International Assessment and Strategy Center.
“China is not going to change its path of aggression in the South China Sea or on the Taiwan Strait,” Fisher said.
“The insights it will gain from RIMPAC will only serve to improve its ability to impose imperialist control over the South China Sea and to better undertake a future military invasion of Taiwan,” he added.
Fisher said that this year’s RIMPAC exercise offered “a very disturbing” illustration of US patience-against-hope versus clear-cut Chinese aggression.
He said that during this year’s RIMPAC exercises, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could gain insights from the conduct of advanced amphibious assault operations by the US Navy’s latest and most modern landing helicopter dock (LHD) ship — the USS America.
“The PLA will likely be most grateful as they also intend to build their own LHD of similar size to the USS America,” Fisher said.
According to a report in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, troops are this week practicing inflatable boat landings in the surf at Hawaii’s Kaneohe Bay and the US is demonstrating landings with 26-tonne amphibious assault vehicles.
A RIMPAC spokesman said that US Marines and the US’ “partner nations” had been busy since last week practicing getting on and off tilt-rotor Ospreys and CH-53E helicopters, and securing objectives, live-firing weapons and training at the shoreline.
Over the next few days, there are to be actual amphibious scenarios in which the Hawaiian islands will be used to represent fictitious countries in military operations.
A US Marine Corps spokesman said that the amphibious scenarios would include “forcible entry from the sea, flying forces off a ship.”
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
WATCH FOR HITCHHIKERS: The CDC warned those returning home from Japan to be alert for any contagious diseases that might have come back with them People who have returned from Japan following the World Baseball Classic (WBC) games during the weekend are recommended to watch for symptoms of infectious gastroenteritis, flu and measles for two weeks, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said. Flu viruses remain the most common respiratory pathogen in Taiwan in the past four weeks and the influenza B virus accounted for 55.7 percent of the tested cases, exceeding the percentage of influenza A (H3N2) infections and becoming the local dominant strain, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said at a news conference on Tuesday. There were 82,187 hospital visits for
Alumni from Japan’s Kyoto Tachibana Senior High School marching band, widely known as the “Orange Devils,” staged a flash mob performance at the Grand Hotel in Taipei yesterday to thank Taiwan for its support after the Great East Japan Earthquake. The show, performed on the earthquake’s 15th anniversary, drew more than 100 spectators, some of whom arrived two hours before the show to secure a good viewing spot. The 26-member group played selections from “High School Musical,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and their signature piece “Sing Sing Sing” and shouted “I love
President William Lai (賴清德) today called for greater mutual aid between Taiwan and Japan in a post commemorating the 15th anniversary of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, saying that “true friendship reveals itself in hardship.” The magnitude 9 earthquake, the largest ever recorded in Japan, and the ensuing tsunami left 18,500 people dead or unaccounted for, and caused a meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. It was the world's worst nuclear disaster since the 1986 Chernobyl accident. Japan and Taiwan share a close bond built on mutual aid and trust, Lai said on Facebook, adding that he hopes they would
RSS