The threat to Taiwan from China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is increasing by the day and the nation is faced with a large quantity of ballistic missiles. In addition, the PLA’s new generation of fighter jets, naval vessels and long-range missiles are increasing rapidly in quality and quantity.
Taiwan faces a vast disparity in military power with its neighbor and the government must rethink how it remodels the armed forces so that it is prepared for threats.
The conditions unique to Taiwan — in particular its limitations in personnel and resources — mean that it should no longer continue to augment its traditional military hardware, such as fighter jets and warships. Instead, the military should follow a strategy of “limited deterrence, robust defense.”
Over the years, the Ministry of National Defense has based its annual Hankuang military exercises on the following scenario:
The PLA uses large quantities of guided missiles for the initial attack, followed by airborne troops in conjunction with bombers and fighter aircraft complimented by a large number of ships and submarines to enforce a naval blockade, before finally dispatching ground troops using amphibious landing craft for a decisive battle.
According to this set of assumptions, Taiwan’s air force and navy are expected to sustain heavy losses during the opening phase of the battle and it is thought that the military would find it difficult to launch any sort of a counterattack. Given this situation, building a large number of aircraft and naval vessels would be too expensive and a misallocation of resources.
Pursuing a strategy of limited deterrence and robust defense would be the most beneficial policy. Taiwan should use the limited resources at its disposal to provide a limited threat of deterrence to its enemies. Taiwan does not need to compete with China in an arms race.
Instead, the military only needs to be able to strike PLA forces at a distance of several hundred kilometers from the Chinese coast to direct its firepower at PLA military bases that pose the greatest threat to Taiwan. If the military can strike at the bases that form China’s first and second lines of defense — and postpone an attack on Taiwan, giving itself more time to move into place its defensive garrisons — then the nation would be in a position to put into action the second half of the strategy: a robust defense.
The nation must manufacture approximately 1,000 guided missiles, which should be deployed across Taiwan proper, with a small number installed on the outlying islands that form Taiwan’s military front line.
A range of 300km to 600km would be sufficient. This is based on two principles:
First, the PLA Navy and Air Force pose the greatest threat to Taiwan and the majority of China’s naval and air bases are within 600km of Taiwan.
If the military prioritizes the destruction of these bases in a war with China, it could reduce the pressure on its forces stationed on Taiwan proper.
Second, the greater the range of a guided missile, the more expensive it is to produce. Faced with a gradually shrinking defense budget, the military must pursue the most efficient defense strategy possible to bring into play limited deterrence and robust defense.
The nation’s military strategy should be predicated upon building professional and cost-effective armed forces. At a time of limited resources, building a small, but technically advanced, agile military is the only sensible way forward.
Ray Song is a graduate of National Chung Cheng University’s Institute of Strategic and International Affairs and a board member of the New World Independent Living Association in Chiayi.
Translated by Edward Jones
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
RSS