The military has far too many generals but does not have sufficient non-commissioned officers (NCOs) to keep the combat readiness of the three services at acceptable levels, an opposition party lawmaker said yesterday.
The military has a total of 493 generals, which means that there is one general for every 680 service members, PFP Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方) said.
"The ratio is much higher than that in the Chinese military, which has only one general for every 1,500 personnel," Lin said.
"It is also higher than that in most Western countries, which have an average of one general for every 1,000 personnel," he said.
Although the military has greatly reduced the number of generals in recent years, it has yet to work harder in that direction, Lin said.
He made the remarks yesterday at a press conference he called at the legislature to review of the current military structure and proposed defense budget for 2003.
"As compared with the high ratio of generals in the military, the supply of NCOs is obviously not enough," Lin said.
"For 2003, the military needs a total of 128,000 NCOs. But it projects that it can get only 97,507 NCOs -- 30,493 short of the demand," he said.
"The oversupply of generals and shortage of NCOs are the two main causes for an unimaginably high number of units with low or unacceptable combat readiness."
As to the proposed defense budget for 2003, Lin highlighted what he said was insufficient training expenditures across the three services.
The military has prepared a small budget of NT$1.14 billion for training training of personnel and maintenance of training facilities, Lin said.
"The money accounts for less than 0.5 percent of the whole budget for next year. By contrast, expenditure for the same purpose in countries such as the US, Japan, and France accounts for 1.81 percent, 0.83 percent and 2.16 percent of the annual defense budgets, respectively," Lin said.
Lin also said that the training expenditure per soldier in Taiwan is NT$3,628 -- the lowest among the four countries mentioned above.
The amount spent per soldier is NT$200,000 in the US, NT$438,484 in Japan and NT$168,295 in France.
Over the past 10 years, the air force, army and navy have acquired a large quantity of new equipment and weapon systems. But they have not raised training expenditures in proportion to the increase of new hardware, Lin said.
The army, for instance, would rather spend big money on buying the state-of-the-art AH-64D Apache Longbow attack helicopter than invest in building a flight simulator to train pilots.
The AH-64D are going to cost NT$1 billion each, an amount that is twice the current annual training expenditure of the army.
The Ministry of National Defense declined to comment on Lin remarks.
It usually takes one or two days before a response is made to defense-related issues raised by people outside the military.
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