Taiwan is to launch next week a series of combat-readiness drills ahead of major exercises testing the military’s readiness and whole-of-society resilience, sources said yesterday.
Summer and autumn are typically the peak seasons for Taiwan’s annual military exercises.
While the Han Kuang exercises are well-known to the public, the Ministry of National Defense has over the years introduced major reforms to better reflect modern battlefield conditions and improve training effectiveness, including removing designated opposing force scenarios and extending the exercise to 10 days and nine nights.
Photo: Taipei times
To ensure smoother execution, the ministry in February announced a significant overhaul of its annual training schedule.
Sources confirmed yesterday that the military would first conduct a five-day “immediate combat readiness drill” starting on Monday.
This is to be followed by a one-week “joint defense exercise” on July 13 designed as a prelude to the Han Kuang, they said.
The main event, Han Kuang Exercise No. 42, is scheduled to begin on Aug. 5, they said, adding that it would run alongside civil defense urban resilience drills and reserve mobilization exercises, testing whole-of-society defense resilience through closer civil-military integration.
For the joint defense exercise, the defense ministry has said that it would be based on the military’s existing joint operations plans and involve the deployment of troops for live, dynamic drills.
The exercise is designed to test coordination between supporting and supported units across the army, navy and air force, focusing on how different forces work together throughout the course of an operation, with scenarios carried out in relevant operational areas, sources said.
Analysts have described the exercise as a warm-up for the Han Kuang No. 42 live-fire drill in August.
Sources said that in response to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) growing use of aircraft and naval deployments, alongside joint drills with the China Coast Guard and other “gray zone” tactics designed to blur the line between peacetime and wartime, the military has revised its joint operational planning.
The previous three-stage structure has been streamlined into a two-phase framework: a routine combat readiness period and a defense operations period, they said.
Under the combat readiness phase, the military has introduced new alert levels, including combat preparation deployment, second-level enhanced readiness and first-level heightened alert, they said.
In the defense operations phase, the revised plan outlines joint counter-landing and coastal strike operations, beachhead combat, and deep defense and sustained operations.
The changes are intended to better prepare for PLA scenarios such as “transitioning from training to exercises” and “from exercises to combat,” the sources said.
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