The DPP and TSU intend to propose measures which will first shorten the length of compulsory military service and eventually lead to the military being an all-volunteer organization. We greet this with cautious approval.
Compulsory military service has long been a bone of contention. The apparent ease with which the well-connected can dodge the draft -- neither PFP Chairman James Soong (
The compulsory draft system belongs to the days when warfare was a question of a large body of men with simple equipment in a fight of attrition where numbers were what mattered. Being physically hardy and a good shot with a rifle was pretty much all that was demanded of a soldier. And it is this kind of soldier that the compulsory military service program is designed to produce.
But are such soldiers actually useful anymore? Modern weapons systems require a degree of expertise and proficiency that conscripts are unlikely to acquire. Modern warfare also requires a degree of both stamina and alertness that only constant training within a professionalized force can produce. The professionalization of the US military since the Vietnam War and its increase in effectiveness is well-known. Less well known is that at the time of the Gulf War 10 years ago the US military discovered how limited the usefulness of non-professional soldiers was. National Guard personnel mobilized for the war were simply not up to the standard that a modern high-tech war of mobility required. This was not a failing of their training, it was just the result of their not being committed professional soldiers.
Compulsory military service gives Taiwan a large land army on the cheap. But it is not, by the standards of small professionalized forces such as Britain's, very good. Some supporters of compulsory service, however, argue that it doesn't have to be very good. It only needs to be better than the People's Liberation Army -- the only real threat to Taiwan -- and big enough to defeat the PLA's notorious human-wave tactics. In which case lots of men with rifles might be just what's needed. The counterargument to this is perhaps that Taiwan's overall defense strategy is aimed at stopping the PLA hordes from ever reaching its shores. And a professional-ized, albeit smaller, land army would be far better at throwing the PLA back into the sea if it ever did establish a beachhead.
A number of questions need to be asked about the DPP-TSU plan. How much smaller would the army be? Would that be big enough? And how much would it cost? One major worry is that the professionalization measures will be adopted as a way of downsizing the armed forces with a view to saving the cash-strapped government money. Actually it is quite likely that a professional force will cost more than the current one.
But if there is one overwhelming reason to support the professionalization of the armed forces it is because it is the last step in "nationalization," the transformation of the military from a private army of the KMT -- in which of course compulsory service offered the chance for useful indoctrination -- into a national fighting force. This task cannot be completed soon enough.
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