Most Taiwanese would likely stay and fight if China attempted to invade Taiwan, Taiwanese-American US Air Force Captain Jimmy Chien said in an interview with Voice of America on Saturday last week.
While 20 percent would attempt to leave Taiwan and 10 percent would surrender, 70 percent would join the fight against an invasion if they were properly trained and equipped, Chien said, citing findings from hundreds of conversations he had with members of the Taiwanese public. However, Taiwan must promptly improve its military training, before it is too late to acquire the capabilities to fend off such an invasion, he added.
The government should heed Chien’s warning and prioritize training reform. The military has been cooperating with the US to secure arms, and has ramped up its development of indigenous vessels, missiles and other weapons, but these platforms would be of little use if Taiwanese troops were poorly trained.
In a Jan. 20 report by CNN, six Taiwanese former conscripts described the military’s training program as “outdated, boring and impractical.” The program puts too much emphasis on bayonet training, and conscripts specialized in weaponry were almost never given live munitions, they said.
One man said that only a dozen rifles usable for shooting practice were available for more than 100 trainees, while another said they only fired 40 live rounds during their entire training period.
Institute of National Defense and Security Research research fellow Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲) suggested that simulations could be used to train on more advanced weapons as a way to save on the high cost of certain munitions, the CNN report said.
In an op-ed published in the Financial Times on June 23 last year, a former Taiwanese conscript and student at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service gave a very similar account of his own training.
“We spent vast swaths of time clearing a hill of rotten garbage and … practicing bayonet drills that were put on as martial arts performances to impress visiting senior officers,” he wrote.
“There were not enough grenades for draftees to learn how to throw them. Instead, we threw badminton shuttles... [and later] were ordered to swing towels to mimic the tossing of grenades,” he wrote.
Another op-ed published by the Web site National Defense on May 23 summed up the situation: “In an environment where everyone does pointless routines, soldiers eventually become nonchalant, develop predisposed defeatism and just ‘swim with the tide,’” while “those who exercise independent thinking and deviate from the norm to excel are suppressed.”
In his interview, Chien cited recruits and junior military personnel as saying they could not make timely decisions on their own, as every decision had to go through a long chain of command. Chien said that this inefficient command model was the cause of the defeat of the Republic of China military in the Chinese Civil War. The military must be less centralized — especially when it comes to decisionmaking — so troops would feel empowered to make quick decisions during combat.
The Taiwanese military has a real PR problem — even those keen on fighting to defend the nation’s sovereignty look at the conscription system with disdain. The government must bring in military consultants from the US and elsewhere to help it reform training to make it interesting and relevant, and devote more of the defense budget to this end. Training could also incorporate skills that would be transferable to the private sector, such as in medicine, computer programming and engineering, to make conscription more appealing.
It is imperative that Taiwan improves the training quality for conscripts and that it does so promptly, to avoid being left unprepared if Chins attacks.
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