Tue, Jan 30, 2001 page4

• Military `ghosts' continue to haunt despite cutbacks

  THE CHINGSHIH PROJECT The 1997 plan to streamline personnel sidelined thousands of officers without their pensions. A few, however, have managed to stay on as `extras' and the military has largely looked the other way

  • By Brian Hsu / STAFF REPORTER
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  One morning early this month, Chief of the General Staff General Tang Yao-ming (湯曜明) called an emergency meeting to discuss how to handle exposure by a local Chinese-language newspaper of "ghosts" in the military.

  The "ghosts" are not real ghosts, but a group of senior officers who have not been appointed to formal positions but linger on as "extras" in an office in which they are allowed to stay for a while.

  These officers, who numbered over 200 three months ago but have now dropped to less than 100, are mostly lieutenant colonels who should have left the service because of a lack of positions for them.

  

  Soldiers stand at attention at a presidential review of the military in Taoyuan county. Since July 1997, the military has undergone a massive downsizing project aimed at reducing the forces by 68,000 members. The project is slated to be completed by the middle of this year.

  FILE PHOTO

  They refuse to leave because they are nearing their 20-year service ceiling. They do not want to give up because many of them are only six to eight months short of the retirement threshold, which is sometimes referred to as the "club of the carefree." According to regulations, these ghost officers, called "stand-by" officers, must leave the service if they fail to be formally appointed to a post within half a year from the time they are put on stand-by.

  But in fact, many of them have managed to survive the half-year deadline by moving from one unit to another before they have served a full six months. This is not normal practice in the military, but is tolerated under the circumstances. On humanitarian grounds, General Tang has made a special rule allowing these ghost officers to stay until they are eligible for their pensions.

  They are the lucky ones. Many of their predecessors have been forced to retire from the service over the past four years due to the Chingshih personnel streamlining project (精實專案) despite their closeness to retirement.

  They are to be the last group of officers to leave the service because of the Chingshih project, billed as the largest-ever slim-down of the military. The project kicked off in July 1997 and is slated to be completed in the middle of this year. The final projected number of troops is 384,000, a reduction of 68,000 from the 452,000 of four years ago. The military is always proud to introduce the Chingshih project as one of its greatest achievements of recent decades.

  But for those who were forced to leave the service, the Chingshih project is a disaster.

  When they left, they were only given a small compensation package. They were mostly officers, ranked from major to colonel, with some as close to the 20-year retirement threshold as the ghost officers are now. There were also quite a number of captains choosing an early termination of their military career.

  The job cuts across the services primarily affect lieutenant colonels and colonels, who have to fight hard not to be kicked out.

  The total number of lieutenant colonel positions, for instance, has been cut by nearly 3,000 over the past four years. The number does not entirely reflect the number of lieutenant colonels who have actually been laid off because some positions are only to be occupied in the event of war. But the actual number is not far off.

  The swathe of job cuts among lieutenant colonels and colonels has only increased the workloads of those who manage to stay, without really enhancing their efficiency, as the Chingshih project was expected to do, said a defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

  It also has resulted in a promotion jam among lower-ranked officers, who have to stay in their current jobs or ranks for longer than before as promotions are no longer tied to time in a position, the official said.

  General Tang knows the problem, but said he cannot do much to undo a policy imposed upon him by his predecessors, including Generals Tang Fei (唐飛) and Lo Pen-li (羅本立), the initiator of the Chingshih project. Lo served as CGS between 1995 and 1998.

  In a matter-of-fact manner, General Tang admitted to the problem and called public attention to it during a report to the legislature's defense committee last year.

  "Due to the Chingshih project, the workload for military personnel in general has increased. It seriously affects troop leaders at basic levels [from company to battalion]. They have become less willing to stay in the service than before," Tang said.

  "It has had negative effects on the arms build-up. It has become the greatest worry for the military as it moves towards its goal of modernization," he said.

  General Tang also revealed a serious shortage of manpower, including combat pilots, non-commissioned officers and army company leaders. While he was raising the alarm about manpower shortages in the armed forces, quite a number of retired officers were left alone, trying to start new lives outside the barracks.

  An army colonel, who was responsible for combat planning at the army general headquarters, now drives a taxi in Taipei. A former combat pilot runs a beef noodle stand. A former army lieutenant colonel cannot find a regular job one year after retirement because he still cannot get used to listening to orders rather than giving them, one of his friends said.

  Though apparently few and far between, there have been success stories. There are retired officers earning good incomes running restaurants or selling goods in night markets.

  General Tang was known in military circles to have openly argued with his predecessor, Tang Fei, about how to continue a project as problematic as the Chingshih, sources said. It happened while Tang Fei was defense minister. Tang Fei did not totally identify with the Chingshih project, either, but, for a variety of reasons, he did not choose to reverse the tide.

  While serving as CGS between 1998 and 1999, Tang Fei tried to replace the Chingshih project with an ultimately aborted plan worked out by Admiral Liu Ho-chien (劉和謙). Liu served as CGS between 1991 and 1995. His plan was called the "Chungyuan Project." It was also designed to streamline the structure of the forces, but its main target was the generals, rather than lower-ranked officers.

  Admiral Liu's idea was to greatly cut the number of generals, over 700 at the time, and also to comprehensively downgrade the ranks of military leaders. Liu's plan was abandoned when army General Lo Pen-Li became CGS. It was replaced with the Chingshih.

  A high-ranking official with the Ministry of National Defense said the Chingshih project would not have produced so many problems if it had proceeded at a slower pace.

  "A mere four years is not enough for a grand project like Chingshih to be fully implemented. If the execution process had been slower, it would not have caused so much resentment from the streamlined personnel and would have produced a smoother transition," the official said.

  "Of course, what has been done cannot be undone. The initial promoters of the program are surely at fault for having pushed it too fast," he said.

  On a brighter side, the Chingshih project has contributed to the modernization of the armed forces, such as the establishment of combined arms brigades in the army.

  The combined arms brigades, formed to replace divisions as the basic strategic unit of the army, came into being as a result of the military leadership's awareness of the fact that divisions no longer meet battle needs in Taiwan and that a smaller, highly mobile brigade can be of more use.

  But despite high expectations, the combined arms brigades inaugurated over the past four years have the same problems as divisions used to have -- lack of personnel and equipment to function as designed, an army official revealed.

  The airborne brigades, for instance, do not have any reliable transport helicopters to use over the next few years.

  They will soon become "land-borne" after their aging UH-1H transport helicopters are mothballed. They do not even have enough pilots to fly their advanced AH-1W attack helicopters or OH-58D reconnaissance helicopters.

  An anonymous AH-1W pilot with a Taoyuan-based airborne battalion recently revealed in a phone interview with ETTV news that the total number of pilots they have now can fly only one-third of the AH-1Ws in use.

  The planned mothballing of the UH-1Hs is expected to help rectify the shortage of pilots for the AH-1Ws and OH-58Ds. But even a complete transfer of the UH-1H pilots will not solve the problem entirely.

  In other types of combined arms brigades, which do not use so much high-tech equipment, manpower shortage is most serious at company levels, which rely heavily on insufficiently-trained reserve officers for their operations.
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