The Executive Yuan on Nov. 25 approved a special defense budget to acquire mostly indigenous weapons, such as missiles, to rapidly build up Taiwan’s combat capabilities. Together with a US military arms procurement budget proposed earlier this year, the nation is to invest nearly NT$334 billion (US$12 billion) by 2030 to deploy a “porcupine strategy” of asymmetric warfare, which includes strengthening the military’s countermeasures on land and sea by introducing US-made arms and developing indigenous naval vessels.
How to address a military threat of missiles, rockets, fighters and drones — whose lethality continues to advance — is a matter of deep concern, especially due to the expense and limited availability of precision firepower.
In addition to the immediate tasks of bolstering C4ISR — command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance — capabilities, and improving the accuracy of target identification and threat assessment to use ammunition more effectively, it is necessary to pursue more cost-effective military solutions.
In the Israeli-Palestinian crisis in May, the Israeli Iron Dome air-defense system performed excellently: Hamas launched about 4,300 rockets at Israel and the Iron Dome successfully intercepted 90 percent of them.
Although the Iron Dome is known to be the most cost-effective missile air-defense system of its kind, its construction cost US$50 million, each Iron Dome missile costs about US$49,000 and each interception mission costs US$100,000 to US$150,000. Using the Iron Dome to counter a large number of rockets or drones is a huge financial burden, and it would not be practical or adequate if faced with larger-scale attacks.
Many countries have sought to develop more economical alternatives — such as directed-energy weapons, including laser weapons — to increase their tactical options.
Laser weapons use light beyond the visible spectrum to project high-intensity energy to destroy or disable a target. It has the advantages of speed, rapid response and concealment.
What is particularly attractive about laser weapons is their high price-to-performance ratio and low supply requirements: The cost of each interception can be as inexpensive as a few US dollars and as long as the power supply is ensured, there is no need to worry about running out of ammunition.
However, the power of laser weapons can be compromised by atmospheric thermal blooming, which distorts and weakens the beam, a problem that worsens if there is fog, smoke, dust, rain, snow or smog. Because of the systems’ power and cooling requirements, it remains to be seen whether laser weapons can be deployed as practical military weapons.
Despite all of this, the US military seems to have made significant progress in the practical use of laser weapons. The US Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey is equipped with a lower-power laser weapon system — called the Optical Dazzler Interdictor Navy counter-uncrewed aerial system — capable of striking drones and small surface vessels.
There are a variety of laser weapons under development in the US, while Russia, France, Germany, China and Israel have also invested their development.
Taiwan should enhance its porcupine strategy by introducing laser weapons to the military through international cooperation, such as the investment model used when Taiwan and the US collaborated on advanced F-16V jets, or development with Lithuania, a new friend of the nation known in Europe for its laser industry.
Steven Wu is a researcher and manager in the fields of biotechnology and medicine.
Translated by Lin Lee-kai
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Taiwan aims to elevate its strategic position in supply chains by becoming an artificial intelligence (AI) hub for Nvidia Corp, providing everything from advanced chips and components to servers, in an attempt to edge out its closest rival in the region, South Korea. Taiwan’s importance in the AI ecosystem was clearly reflected in three major announcements Nvidia made during this year’s Computex trade show in Taipei. First, the US company’s number of partners in Taiwan would surge to 122 this year, from 34 last year, according to a slide shown during CEO Jensen Huang’s (黃仁勳) keynote speech on Monday last week.
On May 13, the Legislative Yuan passed an amendment to Article 6 of the Nuclear Reactor Facilities Regulation Act (核子反應器設施管制法) that would extend the life of nuclear reactors from 40 to 60 years, thereby providing a legal basis for the extension or reactivation of nuclear power plants. On May 20, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) legislators used their numerical advantage to pass the TPP caucus’ proposal for a public referendum that would determine whether the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant should resume operations, provided it is deemed safe by the authorities. The Central Election Commission (CEC) has
RSS