The Ministry of National Defense (MND) yesterday said the time has not yet come for the adoption of a voluntary enrollment system to replace the draft system for the recruitment of soldiers.
"The government has to increase the yearly defense budget by NT$100 billion if all of the existing 260,000 conscripts in the armed forces are to become professional soldiers," MND spokesman Major General Huang Sui-sheng (
"Besides, China has not renounced use of force against Taiwan. Under such circumstances, we need to maintain a force large enough to defend the country," Huang said. The number of Taiwanese the military estimates it needs to defend the country is for the moment 380,000, a figure combining both conscripts and enlistees.
Huang made the remarks yesterday at a regular press conference of the MND in response to inquiries from the media over the possibility of the military replacing the draft with enlistment as the way to recruit soldiers.
Huang said the MND is thinking in that direction, but he cited a long list of difficulties which he said the MND has found as to the proposed plan to recruit all the soldiers via enlistment.
One of the difficulties is the additional personnel cost that the MND estimates it will need to spend to replace all of the conscripts with professional soldiers. The extra cost is estimated to be around NT$100 billion a year.
"The best condition for us is to keep the current personnel recruitment system, which is a combination of conscription and enlistment," Huang said.
The conscription system is for the recruitment of soldiers, while the enlistment is for the enrollment of officers and non-commissioned officers.
"Most of the countries in the world adopt a similar system to ours in the recruitment of armed forces. There are only a few countries like the US, the United Kingdom and Japan, whose militaries rely solely on enlistment for the provision of manpower.
These countries are often without any immediate threat from an enemy," Huang said. "We are in a different situation. We feel constant military threats from China."
"Even if we wanted to replace all the conscripts with professional soldiers, we will not find enough young people who are interested in a military career. Our understanding of the current social conditions is that most of the young people do not like tough and boring jobs like in the military, no matter how high the pay they can get for the jobs," he said.
"There has also been a long-term prejudice existing among ordinary people against servicemen. They think only the bad boys will join the military. Such prejudice has been affecting us for quite a long period of time," he said.
Despite all the difficulties, Huang said the MND will seriously consider the possibility of replacing all the conscripts with professional soldiers, since the military will need more and more specialized personnel to handle highly sophisticated modern weapon systems.
TRAGEDY: An expert said that the incident was uncommon as the chance of a ground crew member being sucked into an IDF engine was ‘minuscule’ A master sergeant yesterday morning died after she was sucked into an engine during a routine inspection of a fighter jet at an air base in Taichung, the Air Force Command Headquarters said. The officer, surnamed Hu (胡), was conducting final landing checks at Ching Chuan Kang (清泉崗) Air Base when she was pulled into the jet’s engine for unknown reasons, the air force said in a news release. She was transported to a hospital for emergency treatment, but could not be revived, it said. The air force expressed its deepest sympathies over the incident, and vowed to work with authorities as they
A tourist who was struck and injured by a train in a scenic area of New Taipei City’s Pingsi District (平溪) on Monday might be fined for trespassing on the tracks, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday. The New Taipei City Fire Department said it received a call at 4:37pm on Monday about an incident in Shifen (十分), a tourist destination on the Pingsi Railway Line. After arriving on the scene, paramedics treated a woman in her 30s for a 3cm to 5cm laceration on her head, the department said. She was taken to a hospital in Keelung, it said. Surveillance footage from a
Police have issued warnings against traveling to Cambodia or Thailand when others have paid for the travel fare in light of increasing cases of teenagers, middle-aged and elderly people being tricked into traveling to these countries and then being held for ransom. Recounting their ordeal, one victim on Monday said she was asked by a friend to visit Thailand and help set up a bank account there, for which they would be paid NT$70,000 to NT$100,000 (US$2,136 to US$3,051). The victim said she had not found it strange that her friend was not coming along on the trip, adding that when she
INFRASTRUCTURE: Work on the second segment, from Kaohsiung to Pingtung, is expected to begin in 2028 and be completed by 2039, the railway bureau said Planned high-speed rail (HSR) extensions would blanket Taiwan proper in four 90-minute commute blocs to facilitate regional economic and livelihood integration, Railway Bureau Deputy Director-General Yang Cheng-chun (楊正君) said in an interview published yesterday. A project to extend the high-speed rail from Zuoying Station in Kaohsiung to Pingtung County’s Lioukuaicuo Township (六塊厝) is the first part of the bureau’s greater plan to expand rail coverage, he told the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times). The bureau’s long-term plan is to build a loop to circle Taiwan proper that would consist of four sections running from Taipei to Hualien, Hualien to
RSS