If anyone had doubts about Taiwan’s ability to defend itself, a report released by the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recently is sure to turn those into nightmares.
The agency’s assessment painted a bleak portrait of Taiwan’s Air Force, with quasi-obsolete Mirage 2000s and F-5s likely to be mothballed, while the aging fleet of F-16s and Indigenous Defense Fighters are in dire need of refurbishing. In fact, even if those models were upgraded, their limited capabilities put into question Taiwan’s ability to achieve air superiority against the People’s Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF), which in recent years has rapidly transformed and modernized — thanks largely to sales and technology transfers from Russia.
The report’s message is therefore loud and clear, if not self-evident: Taiwan will need, soon, advanced fighter aircraft in sufficient quantity to consolidate one of the principal pillars in its defense strategy: denying its airspace to the PLAAF.
The Air Force’s dwindling resources, however, are only part of the problem. As the DIA states in its report, Taiwan’s aircraft will only be effective if airports and runways are sufficiently protected — and that, too, remains a big if. China has greatly enhanced the quantity, sophistication and accuracy of its ballistic and cruise missiles, which means that the PLA has enough missiles to overwhelm Taiwan’s air defense systems. As the Project 2049 think tank, discussing Taiwan’s Quadrennial Defense Review, noted last year, by “employing runway penetrating submunitions in SRBM [short-range ballistic missile] attacks against Taiwan’s airbases, the PLA’s 2nd Artillery can prevent Taiwan’s Air Force from defending its skies, which raises the question of the aircrafts’ wartime utility.” In other words, the aircraft could be rendered unusable before an actual invasion.
Aside from hardening hangars and the ability to quickly repair runways, Taiwan’s airbases rely mostly on PAC-2 and PAC-3 missile interceptors for protection against a missile attack. Not only are the missiles costly (about US$9 million each), but the two-to-one ratio to ensure the interception of an incoming SRBM makes it doubly so. Still, the bulk of US arms sales intended for Taiwan in recent years — at least in dollar terms —consists of such missiles. The PAC-3 missile fire units and 330 missiles approved by the US government in 2008 are scheduled for delivery in August 2014. That is more than four years from now, a period during which the 2nd Artillery and the PLAAF will continue to widen the military imbalance in the Taiwan Strait.
The expensive PAC-3 sales make sense only if they are intended to protect systems that are critical to Taiwan’s defense. Aside from command-and-control, those systems are the Air Force. This means that absent substantial investments in the modernization of its fleet of aircraft — more advanced F-16s or some alternative — Taiwan would be spending billions of dollars on a missile defense system that, in the end, would be close to worthless. Washington didn’t need the DIA report to know this, and yet it continues to stall requests for F-16s. Should it continue to do this, it could be accused of selling an old lady a prohibitively expensive baseball bat to protect herself against a squad of Mafiosi equipped with tanks and machine guns.
Taiwan needs birds. Without them, everything else is theater.
As the incursions by China into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone intensify, the international community’s anxiety has risen over the question of whether the US military would become directly involved in the case of an attack on Taiwan. Washington’s long-held policy of “strategic ambiguity” does little to ease the trepidation. The rationale universally espoused on “strategic ambiguity” is that an announced commitment from Washington to directly defend Taiwan would encourage Taiwanese independence and consequently bring forth a Chinese military attack and a possible nuclear confrontation between two superpowers. However, this line of argument could soon lose steam if the subject is viewed from
Having deceived the world about its nuclear capabilities while preparing for an arms race, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is now using its increasing nuclear forces for virtual nuclear coercion. This new threat will continue until the United States, Japan, and Taiwan can restore the CCP’s sense of fear. This dynamic is a familiar one for Taiwan. As the CCP’s People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) capabilities have grown, its inhibitions about conducting larger and more frequent coercive military demonstrations have shrunk. The PLA now more openly practices for the destruction of Taiwan’s democracy and the murder of its citizens. In the nuclear realm,
The Tokyo Olympics will perhaps be remembered as one of the oddest Games in the event’s long and checkered history. Held amid a global pandemic, spectators are banned from most venues, leaving athletes to play out their feats of sporting brilliance in eerie silence. Meanwhile, furious Tokyo residents wave placards outside some venues, calling for the Games’ cancelation. Adding to the incongruity of it all, the entire Russian team is absent, banned due to a doping scandal. That the Tokyo Olympics went ahead at all has been extremely contentious in Japan. Critics fear a mass outbreak of the highly contagious Delta
Just a few days after an outbreak of locally transmitted COVID-19 cases, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in May announced that a domestically produced vaccine against the virus would become available late this month. At the time, even though the government had placed orders for the Moderna and AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines, just 700,000 of the doses had arrived, and many Taiwanese were reluctant to get inoculated, in no small part due to the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) disinformation campaign about the AstraZeneca vaccine’s alleged shortcomings. Before the outbreak, the government had been successful in keeping the number of infections to a minimum,
RSS