A former US Department of Defense official has called on Washington and Taipei to abandon what he called “outdated strategic assumptions,” as the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) rapidly modernizes and China leverages “comprehensive national power.”
Chad Sbragia, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense for China at the Office of the Secretary of Defense from 2019 to last year, issued the warning at the Taipei Security Dialogue.
The dialogue is organized by the Institute for National Defense and Security Research think tank, which was established by the Ministry of National Defense in 2018.
Photo: Tien Su-hua, Taipei Times
In his keynote address, Sbragia, a researcher at the US-based Institute for Defense Analyses think tank, said the PLA’s modernization over the past few decades deserves the world’s attention.
“A critical feature of PLA modernization is not simply the development of advanced equipment or the adoption of new concepts in advanced warfare. They’re doing all of those,” Sbragia said.
“It’s really the integration of command and organizational systems to leverage new capabilities in a manner which unifies the whole-of-nation’s capacity to make war,” he said.
In light of an increasingly modernized PLA, current China-related defense paradigms espoused by the US and Taiwan are “outdated,” Sbragia said.
“Analysts must reassess how China’s broad modernization and development of comprehensive national power are generating new solutions and paradigms for deterrence and the potential for conflict,” he said.
Sbragia also said that the US-China rivalry would likely override all other considerations in a potential cross-strait conflict that would put greater pressure on the capacity to respond.
In such a scenario, the space for decisionmaking contracts and the ability to seize initiative starts to wane, while the capacity to marshal unified allied action is extremely compressed, he said.
“This exposes any lack of unified preparations that really fosters fait accompli conditions” for China, he said.
Speaking at the forum, Ivan Kanapathy, who served on the White House’s National Security Council as director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, and was deputy senior director for Asian affairs from 2018 to last year, said that Taiwan should refrain from using military force to confront the PLA’s “gray zone” tactics.
Rather than publicizing incursions into its air defense identification zone (ADIZ) and over the Taiwan Strait median line, Taiwan should instead focus on its territorial seas and contiguous zones, said Kanapathy, currently a senior associate to the CSIS Freeman Chair in China Studies.
He called on Taiwan’s military to radically redesign its force structures to “embrace cost-effective and resilient capabilities” that would deny an enemy invasion and protect Taiwan against territorial infringements.
Addressing the opening of the event, institute chairman Huoh Shoou-yeh (霍守業) said that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is no longer a conflict between two nation-states, but has transformed into a confrontation pitting the forces of authoritarianism against democracy.
War in the Taiwan Strait is a matter of if, not when, because Beijing believes great power status entitles it to territorial expansion, he said.
Taiwan has endured warlike threats from China for more than 70 years as its values and institutions are opposite to Beijing’s, he said, adding that the purpose of the nation’s preparations for war is not to provoke conflict, but to safeguard peace.
Military preparedness helps ensure that the rivalry between Taiwan and China is resolved peacefully via institutional means instead of open warfare, he said.
President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) policy seeks to maintain peace and the “status quo” in the region, Mainland Affairs Council Deputy Minister Chiu Chui-cheng (邱垂正) said.
Cooling relations with China have not altered the government’s commitment to conducting dialogue on the basis of equality and mutual respect without preconditions, he added.
Meanwhile, two experts from Ukraine and the Czech Republic urged Taiwan to prepare for a possible Chinese invasion well ahead of time by stockpiling weapons, and training civilians and reservists.
Yurii Poita, head of the Asia-Pacific Section at the Ukraine-based Center for Army, Conversion and Disarmament Studies, said that an important lesson from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is that Kyiv “didn’t expect a full-scale invasion.”
Failure to recognize beforehand that the war could turn into a full-scale one instead of the smaller-scale conflicts in Crimea or Donbas that it originally anticipated cost lives in Ukraine, Poita said.
Jakub Janda, director of the Prague-based European Values Center for Security Policy, agreed with Poita.
The US rightly warned of a looming Russian invasion, and the alert could have saved thousands of Ukrainian lives if Kyiv had made the necessary preparations, Janda said.
“Because, in the end, as you know it very well in the case of Taiwan, it’s really about the stocks” of weapons and military equipment, Janda said.
The lack of preparation was also seen in Ukraine’s recruitment of a foreign legion, which happened at the last minute, he said.
“Obviously this legion will not win the war, but it does actually bring a lot of expertise,” he said, adding that it should have been prepared and launched months before the crisis started.
Janda also highlighted the importance of the Czech Republic’s efforts to establish an all-out defense capability.
One cannot win a war by relying on its military only, he said. “You need to have society on your side.”
In the case of the Czech Republic, it has active reserve forces that are part of the military, but also take advantage of civilian forces as well, he said.
It takes ammunition and will to fend off an invasion, “because without the will, you can have as much as ammunition as you want, but you will collapse as a society,” he said.
Additional reporting by Lu Yi-hsuan
RETHINK? The defense ministry and Navy Command Headquarters could take over the indigenous submarine project and change its production timeline, a source said Admiral Huang Shu-kuang’s (黃曙光) resignation as head of the Indigenous Submarine Program and as a member of the National Security Council could affect the production of submarines, a source said yesterday. Huang in a statement last night said he had decided to resign due to national security concerns while expressing the hope that it would put a stop to political wrangling that only undermines the advancement of the nation’s defense capabilities. Taiwan People’s Party Legislator Vivian Huang (黃珊珊) yesterday said that the admiral, her older brother, felt it was time for him to step down and that he had completed what he
ROLLER-COASTER RIDE: More than five earthquakes ranging from magnitude 4.4 to 5.5 on the Richter scale shook eastern Taiwan in rapid succession yesterday afternoon Back-to-back weather fronts are forecast to hit Taiwan this week, resulting in rain across the nation in the coming days, the Central Weather Administration said yesterday, as it also warned residents in mountainous regions to be wary of landslides and rockfalls. As the first front approached, sporadic rainfall began in central and northern parts of Taiwan yesterday, the agency said, adding that rain is forecast to intensify in those regions today, while brief showers would also affect other parts of the nation. A second weather system is forecast to arrive on Thursday, bringing additional rain to the whole nation until Sunday, it
CONDITIONAL: The PRC imposes secret requirements that the funding it provides cannot be spent in states with diplomatic relations with Taiwan, Emma Reilly said China has been bribing UN officials to obtain “special benefits” and to block funding from countries that have diplomatic ties with Taiwan, a former UN employee told the British House of Commons on Tuesday. At a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee hearing into “international relations within the multilateral system,” former Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) employee Emma Reilly said in a written statement that “Beijing paid bribes to the two successive Presidents of the [UN] General Assembly” during the two-year negotiation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Another way China exercises influence within the UN Secretariat is
CHINA REACTS: The patrol and reconnaissance plane ‘transited the Taiwan Strait in international airspace,’ the 7th Fleet said, while Taipei said it saw nothing unusual The US 7th Fleet yesterday said that a US Navy P-8A Poseidon flew through the Taiwan Strait, a day after US and Chinese defense heads held their first talks since November 2022 in an effort to reduce regional tensions. The patrol and reconnaissance plane “transited the Taiwan Strait in international airspace,” the 7th Fleet said in a news release. “By operating within the Taiwan Strait in accordance with international law, the United States upholds the navigational rights and freedoms of all nations.” In a separate statement, the Ministry of National Defense said that it monitored nearby waters and airspace as the aircraft