Mon, Apr 13, 2026 page8

• Guermantes Lailari On Taiwan: The deadly myth of kinship: Why Taiwan must reform to survive

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  To counter the CCP’s escalating threats, Taiwan must build a national consensus and demonstrate the capability and the will to fight.

  The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) often leans on a seductive mantra to soften its threats, such as “Chinese do not kill Chinese.” The slogan is designed to frame territorial conquest (annexation) as a domestic family matter. A look at the historical ledger reveals a different truth. For the CCP, being labeled “family” has never been a guarantee of safety; it has been the primary prerequisite for state-sanctioned slaughter. From the forced starvation of 150,000 civilians at the Siege of Changchun during the Civil War to the tens of millions killed during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, the CCP’s path to power is paved with the mass murder of Chinese people or murder of newly occupied populations (Inner Mongolia, Tibet and East Turkestan, known to the Chinese as Xinjiang).

  Today, this same rhetoric is aimed at Taiwan. But history serves as a chilling warning: the “peaceful” overtures of the Party are merely the prelude to the next wave of carnage. To prevent a dystopian future of CCP occupation, Taiwan must look past the propaganda and address its own internal vulnerabilities.

  

  Under an Orwellian People’s Liberation Army (PLA) occupation, the CCP would enforce the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) Military Service Law, treating all Taiwanese as citizens bound by a “sacred duty” to serve. Men aged 18-26 would face a mandatory two-year conscription period, and those up to 38 would be integrated into the reservist and militia systems for wartime mobilization.

  Resistance would trigger devastating social and administrative penalties. Non-compliance would result in massive fines and a “dishonesty” mark on the Social Credit System, effectively blacklisting individuals from stable employment, higher education, and basic luxuries like air travel or high-speed rail.

  Serious refusal would be prosecuted as “separatism” or state subversion. Under PRC Criminal Law, this carries penalties ranging from five years to life imprisonment, along with the seizure of personal property. In a declared state of war, such defiance could be escalated to treason, punishable by the death penalty.

  Authoritarian regimes frequently exploit “undesirables” as expendable assets, a strategy highlighted by Russia’s use of prisoners and minorities in Ukraine and echoing the CCP historical precedent. Following the Chinese Civil War, the PLA forcibly absorbed 1.8 million Nationalist (KMT) soldiers, deploying them as shock troops in the Korean War; in some cases, these conscripts constituted 70 percent of first-wave units. The brutality of this forced integration was exposed when roughly 14,000 Chinese POWs — two-thirds of the total — rejected repatriation, and chose to defect to Taiwan. This history warns young Taiwanese males against becoming cannon fodder for the CCP in a potential future conflict.

  Facing a manpower crisis and a massive military threat, the time has come for radical reform in Taiwan’s military training and personnel systems. Survival requires more than just rejecting a false slogan; it requires a nation prepared to defend its future.

  Taiwan is rapidly expanding its drone fleet, aiming to produce 100,000 units by 2028 and 180,000 annually thereafter. However, a critical personnel gap remains: Taiwan currently lacks the manpower to operate, maintain, and repair such a massive fleet while simultaneously sustaining combat casualties.

  Facing a four-million-strong PRC threat, Taiwan’s defense must look beyond the two-million-member PLA to account for 500,000 People’s Armed Police, 500,000 reserves, and one million additional security personnel.

  To counter the CCP threat, Taiwan should require all males to start their military service at age 18, prior to college, which would guarantee 100,000 new conscripts annually. Currently, Taiwan allows all males to delay conscription until after college. This reform would increase Taiwan’s active-duty force from 200,000 to 300,000 — a 50 percent surge — and would align with the policies of nations like Singapore and Israel, which mandate service immediately after high school to ensure national defense is prioritized before higher education or the workforce.

  Current reserve training in Taiwan is insufficient. In 2026, only 18 percent of the “trainable” pool — 126,000 out of 710,000 — will undergo training. While 51,685 personnel will undergo the intensified 14-day “new” training, the remaining 74,315 will complete the traditional 5-to-7-day refresher course.

  To build a credible deterrent, all two million eligible males (ages 18-36) should undergo at least one month of training annually.

  By comparison, other nations maintain much higher standards: Israel requires 55-60 days annually for combat reservists, Singapore mandates up to 40 days per year, and even the US voluntary system requires a minimum of 38 days. Taiwan’s current participation rates and training durations remain disappointingly low.

  Mandating one year of national service for women after high school aligns with majority public support: 2022 polling showed over 52 percent of Taiwanese favor female conscription or mandatory training. This would follow the lead of Israel, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, which utilize gender-neutral drafts to bolster national resilience.

  Women who prefer non-combat roles could still provide lethal support as drone, missile, or radar operators, or serve in intelligence, communications, and logistics. Alternatively, they should be eligible for Taiwan’s Substitute Military Service. This system features fifteen tracks — including public safety, healthcare, and education — allowing draftees to fill critical societal gaps, like Israel’s diverse national service options.

  While women currently comprise 16 percent of Taiwan’s active military (25,000 personnel), this remains far behind Israel (34-38 percent) and several Nordic nations. Although Taiwan began training female reservists in 2023, participation remains dismally low due to bureaucratic obstacles. Adopting a gender-neutral draft or aggressive recruitment would bridge this gap, transforming Taiwan’s defense into a whole-of-society effort. Through these reforms, Taiwan’s military would become a formidable force of 4.3 million personnel, anchored by 300,000 active-duty troops, and bolstered by four million male and female reservists. This force would provide the manpower necessary to sustain the symmetric and asymmetric defenses central to the island’s survival.

  Since the passage of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the US has aggressively accelerated the ROC military’s lethality through intensive training programs in Taiwan and on American soil. This shift mirrors the transformative US and NATO training provided in Ukraine between 2017 and 2022 and, since the invasion, outside Ukraine, which proved decisive in preventing a total defensive collapse.

  Applying these wartime lessons, Taiwan has moved beyond traditional drills to modernize its force. One-year conscripts are no longer just “manpower”; they are being trained as specialized operators for advanced asymmetric systems, ensuring every recruit contributes to a high-tech, lethal deterrent rather than a legacy infantry model.

  The 2026 NDAA expands the Taiwan Security Cooperation Initiative, funding US Coast Guard teams to train Taiwan in maritime law enforcement and counter “gray-zone” tactics.

  These enhancements improve Taiwan’s military, but further scaling of combat and support personnel is essential to adapt to asymmetric and symmetric warfare through additional structural modernization.

  Taiwan must move beyond fragmented drone deployment by establishing a dedicated Uncrewed Systems Branch covering air, sea, underwater, and land domains. Centralizing training, maintenance, and doctrine is a hard-won lesson from Ukraine’s resistance against Russia. To apply Ukraine’s resistance lessons, the Taiwanese Army’s specialized drone academy — launched in 2024 — should be expanded into a national hub to train active-duty personnel and reservists in First-Person View (FPV) and advanced reconnaissance tactics.

  Grassroots organizations like Cofacts, DoubleThink Lab, Taiwan FactCheck Center, MyGoPen (麥擱騙), Auntie Meiyu (美玉姨), Taiwan Society for Targeting Misinformation (TSTM), Taiwan Information Environment Research Center (IORG), Taiwan AI Labs, TeamT5 (private company), FakeNews Cleaner (假新聞清潔劑), Watchout (沃草), and Kuma Academy (黑熊學院) provide a vital community service by tracking and debunking disinformation and misinformation. However, the burden of national cognitive defense should not rest on the shoulders of underfunded NGOs and private companies.

  To maximize national resilience and resistance, the Presidential “Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee” is coordinating government efforts to harden critical infrastructure. However, the military remains hampered by history. The ROC military Political Warfare Department’s offensive mandate was dismantled during democratization to distance the military from its White Terror legacy involving internal surveillance and the suppression of dissent, and to avoid provoking Beijing during periods of cross-strait rapprochement. Although Taiwan’s National Security Bureau tracks the CCP’s cognitive warfare, this new purely defensive posture has created a strategic vacuum that China exploits.

  Taiwan must urgently move beyond a military-only response to the CCP threat and launch a permanent, 24/7 counter-cognitive warfare center. By leveraging its unparalleled mastery of Chinese language and culture, Taiwan can challenge CCP narratives on their own turf and serve as an indispensable resource for its allies.

  Through these recommended personnel and structural reforms, Taiwan’s military would become a formidable force of 4.3 million personnel. The first step toward security is dismissing the CCP’s “Chinese do not kill Chinese” mantra as a historical falsehood. To avoid the nightmare of CCP occupation, Taiwan’s citizens must unite in rigorous physical and mental preparation. Ultimately, international support hinges on Taiwan demonstrating a proactive, uncompromising will to fight.

  Guermantes Lailari is a retired US Air Force Foreign Area Officer specializing in counterterrorism, irregular warfare, missile defense, and strategy. He holds advanced degrees in international relations and strategic intelligence. He was a Ministry of Foreign Affairs Taiwan Fellow in 2022, a visiting scholar at National Chengchi University and National Defense University in 2023, and a visiting researcher at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in 2024 and 2025. He is currently researching in Taiwan as a senior non-resident fellow from the Jewish Policy Center in Washington, DC.
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