The military will stage its major war games every other year instead of holding them annually, Minister of National Defense Chen Chao-min (陳肇敏) said yesterday morning.
“Because the cycle of the live-fire Han Kuang Exercises is too short, making it difficult for the military to have adequate time to correct and adjust shortcomings found in each drill, we have decided to hold the series of drills every other year instead of annually,” Chen told a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign and National Defense Committee.
Chen declined to say whether the decision had anything to do with President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) policy of engagement with China.
To strengthen the military’s combat readiness, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) stages drills each year. The Han Kuang war games are the most important of these exercises. This year’s Han Kuang Exercises wrapped up last month.
Chiu Kuo-cheng (邱國正), the deputy chief of General Staff for Operations and Planning, said the changes would take effect next year with computer war games, followed by live-fire war games in the first half of 2010.
Meanwhile, Chen yesterday said the titles of military attaches working in foreign countries without diplomatic relations would be reinstated starting Jan. 1.
“Our military attaches in foreign countries were not downgraded,” Chen said.
The minister made the remarks following a controversy earlier this month after a media report alleged that the ministry had removed military attache titles from officers stationed in the US because of external pressure.
Chen said the changes were made in September last year so that military personnel working in countries that do not have relations with Taiwan would not be a source of controversy.
Following the complaints, the ministry said it had taken up the matter with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and that the titles would be reinstated.
In response to Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Yu-fang’s (林郁方) proposal that military police be reinstated at Taiwan’s de facto Washington embassy Twin Oaks and the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in Washington, Chen said the decision was up to MOFA, not the MND, and that the military would respect MOFA’s decision.
Additional reporting by Jimmy Chuang
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods