Earlier this month, the Ministry of National Defense said that, beginning in 2011, the military would replace conscripts with professional soldiers at a rate of at least 10 percent annually, with conscription to cease altogether in 2014. At present, men above the age of 20 are required to complete one year of military service.
The idea of a professional Taiwanese army is not a creation of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), nor is it the result of supposedly reduced tensions in the Taiwan Strait.
Measures that would create an all-volunteer or “partial” volunteer military were first floated during the first term of the Democratic Progressive Party administration.
Given the increasingly sophisticated weapons systems that soldiers have to operate in a modern combat environment and the relatively short period of training that conscripts receive during their year’s service, attracting motivated career soldiers who can be fully trained and upgraded as systems and concepts change makes perfect sense.
In fact, under the current conscription system, the duration of which has been nearly halved in recent years, it is doubtful that Taiwanese fresh out of compulsory service would be able to defend the nation if it came under attack.
Aside from the month or so they spend in boot camp, the great majority of conscripts spend time pushing paper in a stuffy office and cannot wait to resume civilian life.
Additionally, morale at times appears to have reached an all-time low.
The problem with the ministry’s announcement on March 9, however, is that it comes amid cuts in the military budget by the KMT government, which has used the pretense of warmer ties with Beijing as justification. Taiwan’s defense budget for this year is US$10.17 billion, or US$301.4 million less than last year’s figure.
As studies have shown, creating a fully professional army is a costly endeavor. One initial estimate, mentioned in Taiwan’s Security by US National War College professor Bernard Cole, was more than US$4 billion, while the initial cost for a “partial” professional army was set at US$400 million.
To put things in perspective, creating a fully professional army would cost Taiwan about one-third of its overall defense budget for this year.
Even if this were spread over a five-year period, the project would represent a major investment.
Without an increase in defense spending or special budget allocations, the creation of a fully professional army by 2014 will be financially impossible.
And yet, when the ministry made the announcement, it did not mention any increases in defense spending.
Nor have officials said anything about raising soldiers’ salaries to make the military a more attractive employer (it did, however, announce on Monday a 16 percent troop cut by 2014, which could help in that regard but is, on its own, insufficient).
Absent career opportunities and remuneration that can compete with what is offered in the private sector, or even in academia, there is no way the military will manage to attract talent in large enough numbers to meet its requirements.
What this means is that either the professionalized military will be anything but — a botched job — or the number of professional soldiers that current budgeting allows for will be so low, quantitatively and qualitatively, that the nation’s defenses will be sorely compromised.
Either way, this situation bodes ill for Taiwan’s ability to defend itself.
J. Michael Cole is a writer based in Taipei.
Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Forward Forum in Taipei, former Singaporean minister for foreign affairs George Yeo (楊榮文) proposed a “Chinese commonwealth” as a potential framework for political integration between Taiwan and China. Yeo said the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait is unsustainable and that Taiwan should not be “a piece on the chessboard” in a geopolitical game between China and the US. Yeo’s remark is nothing but an ill-intentioned political maneuver that is made by all pro-China politicians in Singapore. Since when does a Southeast Asian nation have the right to stick its nose in where it is not wanted
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has released a plan to economically integrate China’s Fujian Province with Taiwan’s Kinmen County, outlining a cross-strait development project based on six major themes and 21 measures. This official document by the CCP is directed toward Taiwan’s three outlying island counties: Penghu County, Lienchiang County (Matsu) and Kinmen County. The plan sets out to construct a cohabiting sphere between Kinmen and the nearby Chinese city of Xiamen, as well as between Matsu and Fuzhou. It also aims to bring together Minnanese cultural areas including Taiwan’s Penghu and China’s cities of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou for further integrated
During a recent visit to Taiwan, I encountered repeated questions about “America skepticism” among the body politic. The basic premise of the “America skepticism” theory is that Taiwan people should view the United States as an unreliable, self-interested actor who is using Taiwan for its own purposes. According to this theory, America will abandon Taiwan when its interests are advanced by doing so. At one level, such skepticism is a sign of a healthy, well-functioning democratic society that protects the right for vigorous political debate. Indeed, around the world, the people of Taiwan are far from alone in debating America’s reliability
As China’s economy was meant to drive global economic growth this year, its dramatic slowdown is sounding alarm bells across the world, with economists and experts criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) for his unwillingness or inability to respond to the nation’s myriad mounting crises. The Wall Street Journal reported that investors have been calling on Beijing to take bolder steps to boost output — especially by promoting consumer spending — but Xi has deep-rooted philosophical objections to Western-style consumption-driven growth, seeing it as wasteful and at odds with his goal of making China a world-leading industrial and technological powerhouse, and
RSS