The latest legislative session, which was already extended for a month following a vote by the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on Dec. 19 last year, finally closed on Friday. Despite the extension, the Executive Yuan’s NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.7 billion) eight-year special defense budget was again blocked by the opposition on Tuesday, and instead the legislature sent the TPP’s own defense bill proposal to the committee for review on the final day. The next session would commence on Feb. 24, after the Lunar New Year break.
With the KMT’s prevarications and the TPP’s alternative proposal, the crucial defense budget review remains in limbo. The hope would be that the TPP’s version is at least workable. Unfortunately, it is not.
Presenting a considerable reduction in the budget as a money-saving virtue, the TPP’s proposal, according to the Ministry of National Defense’s Department of Strategic Planning Director Lieutenant General Huang Wen-chi (黃文啓), hollows out the operational measures of the government’s defense budget and turns the entire endeavor into an exercise in cherry-picking a list of five weapons, without consideration of storage facilities, ammunition depots, shelters, maintenance facilities or training. Huang said that if the TPP version, which he termed “rushed and unprofessional,” was forced through, “it would be impossible for the ministry to implement it.”
The TPP’s version caps the budget at NT$400 billion across eight years, with a requirement of an annual budget and review during that time, making planning and procurement guarantees effectively impossible.
On Jan. 14, well into the extended legislative session in which the defense budget should have been reviewed, TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) returned from a whirlwind visit to Washington in which he met with officials from the White House US National Security Council, US State Department and defense agencies. He then announced that the party had plans for proposing its own special defense budget. It is astonishing that Huang could, in the space of two weeks, develop an integrated plan for the development of Taiwan’s national defense strategy that would be better conceived than the one prepared by the Ministry of National Defense consultations with US defense experts.
Perhaps the requirement of an annual budget and review should be termed the “we’re making this up as we go along” clause.
The TPP version also removed any provisions for the development of President William Lai’s (賴清德) proposed T-Dome sensor-to-shooter nationwide missile defense system.
There is some debate on the advisability of the T-Dome concept. In the article “‘T-Dome’ a potential miscalculation” (page 8, Jan. 14), Masahiro Matsumura, a professor of international politics and national security at St. Andrew’s University in Osaka, questioned whether the proposed system was more about political posturing than sound military strategy, and cautioned against misleading comparisons with Israel’s “Iron Dome” or the US’ proposed “Golden Dome” concepts, saying that these were both designed to address threat scenarios different from that faced by Taiwan. Matsumura also noted the strategic opportunity cost of allocating resources to the system that might be better employed elsewhere.
His reservations about the T-Dome concept could be interpreted as backing the TPP’s removal of it from the budget, but Matsumura also noted another factor influencing Taiwan’s ability to defend itself, and the crucial perception of this overseas, was political unity. The current shenanigans being played out in the Legislative Yuan do little to assuage these concerns.
On Tuesday, Lai called on the opposition parties to allow the government’s defense budget to be submitted for review, saying that if they had reservations about certain parts, they could remove them or propose amendments, but that a review must go ahead nonetheless. That did not happen.
The stalling and introduction of the opposition parties’ own versions is preventing the government from getting on with the task of strengthening Taiwan’s national defenses; after 10 rounds of obstruction by the opposition, even when the ruling party proposed its own version, the KMT and TPP have overridden professional expertise, risking having a military development plan that is fragmented and rendered unworkable.
At the same time, the government has a responsibility to communicate to the public why it has proposed such an expensive package, and why it is preferable to the TPP’s ill-thought-out and ostensibly “cost-saving” NT$400 billion alternative.
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