There have been reports in the past few weeks that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has instructed the Executive Yuan to set aside additional funding for national security. This was confirmed on Thursday when the Cabinet unveiled its budget proposal for fiscal 2021.
The headline figure from the announcement was that defense expenditure would increase by NT$15.6 billion (US$528.1 million), or 4.4 percent, from this year.
More funding has been allocated for the purchase of military hardware and to maintain existing programs. That means that after deducting expenditure that has already been allocated to the nation’s indigenous ship and submarine programs, as well as the NT$29 billion in funding set aside for the purchase of F-16V jets from the US, the total defense budget would only moderately increase from the original estimate of NT$361 billion to NT$366.8 billion.
During a speech in 2016 at a Washington think tank Project 2049 Institute forum, former US deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia Abraham Denmark said that “Taiwan’s defense budget has not kept pace with the threat developments [from China] and should be increased.”
Denmark called for year-on-year increases to the nation’s defense budget, which should be focused on the Taiwan Strait and China, and on bolstering the defense of Taiwan proper.
Although there has been a lack of an obvious enemy threat to China in the past few years, Beijing has expanded its military power far beyond its own defensive needs, so that it poses an extreme threat to Taiwan’s national security.
As a result, Washington has consistently made it clear that it wants Taiwan to allocate a minimum of 3 percent of its GDP to defense.
The national defense budget is the most substantive and concrete expression of a nation’s defense policy.
One of the most important defense policies implemented by Tsai and her administration after gaining power in 2016 was a public commitment to increase defense spending to 3 percent of GDP.
However, during her administration’s first four years in office, every year annual spending on defense has failed to reach even 2 percent of GDP. In each of the last two years of Tsai’s first term, defense spending was only about 1.84 percent of GDP.
For a number of years, there has been a consensus among military experts in the US and Europe that the Taiwan Strait is the area most likely to experience a military conflict.
If Taiwan wants to demonstrate to the world its strong will to resist an enemy and its determination to defend itself, the government must not only continue to invest in asymmetric war fighting capabilities, it must also step up the development of coastal defense submarines and bolster Taiwan’s various missile defense capabilities.
Most important is that the government must continue to increase defense spending until it reaches 3 percent of GDP.
Yao Chung-yuan is an adjunct professor and former deputy director of the Ministry of National Defense’s strategic planning department.
Translated by Edward Jones
As Taiwan’s domestic political crisis deepens, the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have proposed gutting the country’s national spending, with steep cuts to the critical foreign and defense ministries. While the blue-white coalition alleges that it is merely responding to voters’ concerns about corruption and mismanagement, of which there certainly has been plenty under Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and KMT-led governments, the rationales for their proposed spending cuts lay bare the incoherent foreign policy of the KMT-led coalition. Introduced on the eve of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the KMT’s proposed budget is a terrible opening
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,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS