The Ministry of National Defense (MND) yesterday reiterated its goal to build an all-volunteer military force by 2018 after Minister of National Defense Feng Shih-kuan (馮世寬) told lawmakers on Monday that conscription would end in 2018.
It is the ministry’s goal to cease drafting citizens into service by 2018, “a goal that has to be worked toward,” said Major General Fu Cheng-jung (傅政榮), director of the Human Resources Division of the ministry’s Resources Management Department.
However, Fu’s comment was more ambiguous than Feng’s, who also said that ending conscription by 2018 was “a decision that should not be changed.”
Photo: Tu Chu-min, Taipei Times
The ministry had previously been more flexible about the deadline for an all-volunteer force.
Fu said that the number of volunteer soldiers and officers has increased steadily in accordance with the ministry’s predictions.
However, he did not give a direct reply when asked whether the military would have to continue conscription should it fail to recruit the necessary number of volunteers.
“The nation’s military service system has not changed, and the draft system and the volunteer system have been developed in parallel,” he said.
The ministry in 2008 announced that it would build an all-volunteer force by 2014, but ended up having to push back its target date for ending conscription several times.
Men born after 1994 are now exempt from one-year compulsory military service, but will still be required to undergo four months of mandatory military training upon reaching conscription age.
In other defense-related news, amid concerns over Chinese military aircraft that have circled Taiwan’s air defense identification zone twice in two weeks, the ministry said the military will confront intruding Chinese military aircraft “fearlessly, without evasion or weakness.”
However, the military’s exact response would vary depending on whether the intruding aircraft appear hostile, Joint Operations Division Director Major General Chung Shu-ming (鍾樹明) said.
The military monitors China’s military maneuvers closely and was fully aware of the two training missions around Taiwan’s airspace, he said.
It opted to deal with the situation in a way that would not provoke conflict, Chung said.
In the event of a Chinese military fleet with reconnaissance capabilities circling Taiwan, the military would impose a strict control over high-tech weapons and other signal-emitting sources to prevent China from accessing sensitive data, Chung said.
As an example of that flexibility, ministry spokesman Major General Chen Chung-chi (陳中吉) said that a live-fire exercise of the Sky Bow II surface-to-air missile system in October at a base in Pingtung County was canceled after a Chinese reconnaissance ship was discovered off the southern coast.
In addition, the military has a humanitarian contingency plan to rescue the crew of Chinese military vessels should an accident occur, the ministry said.
Search and rescue missions would be deployed if Chinese vessels were involved in an accident in areas to the east of the middle line of the Taiwan Strait, Chung said.
China would be in charge of the search and rescue effort if such an accident occurred to the west of the middle line, he said.
BILINGUAL ASSISTANCE: The center launched a chat bot that features Chinese and English interfaces to provide foreigners with instant information about the pandemic The Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) yesterday said that it would discuss with other nations the possibility of allowing businesspeople to visit on a case-by-case basis. Asked about loosening border restrictions, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center, said at the daily CECC news briefing that while the center is cautious about opening the nation’s borders, it would aim to diminish obstacles for important trade interactions without risking transmission of the novel coronavirus. Several foreign representatives in Taiwan have expressed an interest in the matter and the center would conduct related negotiations with the help of the
DELUSIONAL: The male patient said he did not know that the woman had mental problems, but the court said that her being restrained in isolation should have given him pause The Taiwan High Court has ordered the Jhudong branch of the Taiwan National University Hospital and a male patient to jointly pay a former female patient’s family NT$400,000 in compensation after the man had sex with the woman, who has mental problems, while hospitalized. The 26-year-old woman has been diagnosed with a mental disorder, a symptom of which is that she obsessively seeks to have sex, her mother said. The mother filed a formal complaint and sought damages from the hospital and the male patient surnamed Chen (陳) after finding out that her daughter had sex with the man while
The Taiwan Railways Administration (TRA) should not use the government’s disease-prevention policy as an excuse to block people’s access to the Taipei Railway Station’s main hall, the Taiwan International Workers’ Association said yesterday. The association held a protest at the station after what organizers said were about 400 people staged a sit-in on Saturday to demonstrate against the TRA’s proposal to ban sitting on the floor of the main hall. In accordance with the Central Epidemic Command Center’s disease-prevention measures, large gatherings have been banned in the hall since the end of February. After protesters yesterday expressed their grievances at the southern
Nematode-trapping fungi have been found to be natural killers of nematodes and their mechanisms might facilitate the development of new drugs or biological control agents, an Academia Sinica researcher said yesterday. Mostly measuring less than 1mm, nematodes are found in soil worldwide and most are not visible to the naked eye, Academia Sinica Institute of Molecular Biology assistant research fellow Hsueh Yen-ping (薛雁冰) told a news conference in Taipei. Some nematodes can cause infections in humans or damage plants, but existing pesticides, such as ivermectin, aldicarb and levamisole, can only inhibit their activity and the poisons’ efficacy are declining due to
RSS