The nation’s armed forces can hold the line against China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Minister of National Defense Yen De-fa (嚴德發) yesterday told the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee.
During a question-and-answer session, Yen was asked to evaluate the comparative military capabilities of Taiwan and China, three days after President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) told CNN that Taiwan was “capable of holding off any first waves of attacks” by China.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政) asked what the military’s capabilities were to respond to a PLA “first strike,” and whether it had the ability to mount a pre-emptive strike against China.
Photo: Fang Pin-chao, Taipei Times
The nation’s two-staged military doctrine is to enact force protection, followed by the deployment of combat power, Yen told Lo.
“For force protection, we must be capable of absorbing the first strike, so critical and dependable forces are mechanized, and they will not stay still for the enemy to hit,” he said. “For deploying combat power, we will use counterattacks and early suppression of the enemy, as well as other actions.”
“As for pre-emptive capabilities, we possess them, but we are not at liberty to discuss them,” he said.
However, he added that those capabilities are for creating a multi-layered deterrence, not for launching first strikes.
When DPP Legislator Wu Kun-yuh (吳焜裕) asked Yen to elaborate on the national military doctrine, the minister said Taiwan was not engaged in an arms race with China and the military relies on quality to overcome quantity.
To augment force protection, the ministry is working with local governments to mobilize assets necessary to protect military installations against Chinese guided missiles, in conjunction with concealment and mobility measures, he said.
The armed forces would deploy mobile and decisive weapons systems to fight at the place and time of its choosing, with an emphasis on using the terrain to maximize asymmetric warfare capabilities in the counter-air, counter-naval and counter-amphibious operational phases of such a war, Yen said.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator William Tseng (曾銘宗) asked Yen to gauge the time the military could hold out against the PLA, and what the armed forces would do if war broke out as the result of political conflict between independence and unification factions.
While the military does not quantify defensive time frames for doctrinal reasons, “we have full confidence and capability to stay on top of regional developments and defend our homeland,” Yen said.
The military’s core value is its constitutional duty to defend the Republic of China and the citizens residing within its domain, he said.
The US is certain to intervene if regional security developments threaten its national interests and Japan could possibly be involved, he said, adding that the ministry could not speak for the intentions of the Philippines.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS