Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Eric Chu (朱立倫) late last month outlined his defense policies during a televised policy presentation. During the first presidential candidates’ debate, he reiterated those ideas, pledging to establish an all-volunteer military, restart the streamlining of the military and promote the idea of a high-tech army.
If these are Chu’s three main suggestions for building up the nation’s military, there is reason to be concerned.
First, two of Chu’s three proposals are not feasible; namely, the all-volunteer military and restarting military streamlining. These are pledges that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his administration failed to deliver on because they were blocked by KMT legislators.
These suggestions were also determined to be empty pledges long ago, so it is surprising to see Chu pick them up and use them as his own.
In particular, when addressing the all-volunteer military suggestion, Chu proposed that salaries for volunteers should be raised to NT$40,000 per month as an incentive to join the military.
However, offering equal pay to all soldiers places too much focus on money and this is one of the blind spots in the push for an all-volunteer system.
The current starting salary for volunteers is NT$33,625 per month. To encourage them to stay in service longer, the government also provides two additional subsidies: one for combat troops and one for those in non-combat positions. Not only are these two subsidies a waste, they are also unfair.
The military has repeatedly suggested that to retain outstanding volunteers, the government should provide additional subsidies only to those who have highly specialized skills, professional licenses or are obtaining such licenses and certificates. This would be the best way for the military to retain talented personnel and eliminate those that are not sufficiently qualified.
However, the Ministry of National Defense has refused to implement this reform, making it difficult to keep outstanding talent.
It seems that Chu is unaware of the difficulty facing the recruitment of soldiers to an all-volunteer military, but he still wants to increase monthly salaries to NT$40,000 simply to make things look good.
Chu also said that he would restart a project to streamline the military. Ma also pushed for this project, despite it being blocked by KMT lawmakers because it failed to take the military’s combat capability into consideration, and instead tried to force a Procrustean one-size-fits-all solution.
Yet Chu is now pushing a project that would seriously hurt the military’s combat capabilities. It is difficult to understand why he is doing this.
The last of Chu’s suggestions is to build a high-tech military, but his goal of strengthening guided missile, anti-ship and electronic warfare capabilities is both risky and limited.
It is risky because Chu has overlooked air space control through strengthening the air force’s combat capabilities, and it is limited because control of the seas includes three-dimensional air, surface and underwater combat capabilities, and it cannot be restricted to anti-ship warfare only.
Besides, in this era of information warfare, why would Chu only mention strengthening electronic warfare capabilities?
Chu is running to become the nation’s commander in chief. He really must rely on professionalism and sincerity if he wants to convince the public that he is up to the task, rather than proposing defense policies that simply will not work.
Lin Hon-chan is a military journalist and doctoral student at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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