Is Taiwan’s decrepit air force planning to ask the US to retrofit it with a smokescreen? It must be, given sudden comments by Deputy Minister of National Defense Andrew Yang (楊念祖) in Richmond, Virginia, on Sunday, that Taiwan would welcome discussions about acquiring sophisticated F-35s from the US.
Floating the idea that Taiwan might buy F-35s at some point in the future was apparently Yang’s way of numbing the pain of the then-pending, and now definite US decision not to sell Taiwan F-16C/Ds, jets the air force needs if it wants to still call itself an air force in 10 years.
However, this ruse is highly disingenuous. There is no way Taiwan will ever get F-35s from the US. Other than the F-22 Raptors, which the US has discontinued and never exported, the F-35 is the US’ most advanced fighter jet. It is to the F-16 what a Formula 1 car is to a Porsche. In addition, the F-35 line has been plagued with problems — cost overruns, late shipments, design problems, you name it.
US President Barack Obama’s administration isn’t even willing to sell Taiwan F-16C/Ds, that went into production in the early 1980s, before that line is closed forever in the not too distant future. What on earth makes Yang think the US will sell Taiwan F-35s?
How long does Yang think it would take to negotiate an F-35 deal? The F-16C/D went into production in 1984, following the success of the F-16A/B program, which began in 1976. Taiwan has only just now — in September 2011 — gotten the final decision on negotiations to acquire those jets. That’s almost three decades just to be told: “No.”
The F-35 took its maiden flight in 2006. If we project the same time to negotiate an F-35 deal that it took Taiwan to negotiate the unsuccessful F-16C/D deal from the beginning of production, then the US will be refusing to sell F-35s to Taipei in about 2041.
It does not take a genius to figure out how advanced China’s air force will be at that point. How many generations of stealth fighters will they produce over the next three decades? Will their navy already have credible aircraft carrier battle groups by then? Probably.
Why then even bother suggesting that Taiwan might be interested in negotiating an F-35 deal? Yang might as well have said that Taiwan would try to convince the US to re-open its multibillion-dollar F-22 Raptor line, and then sell the world’s most advanced jet to Taiwan despite US legislation prohibiting Raptor exports.
The dismal truth is that Taiwan will have to make do with upgrades to its F-16A/Bs, and maybe not even upgrades to all of them. It will be forced to patrol the Taiwan Strait with jalopies while Chinese pilots zip around in Ferraris.
Suggesting that Taiwan’s air force could buy F-35s is like a school principal telling parents he could not afford to replace aging black-fume-burping gas--guzzler school buses with fuel-efficient minibuses, but would apply at some time in the future to acquire a fleet of sleek BMWs that would pick up each and every student at his or her home.
Keep dreaming, Yang.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS