A US business group issued a statement on Thursday questioning US President Joe Biden’s weapons sales policy for Taiwan, in response to the recent announcement of a fourth Taipei-bound defense package approved by the administration containing naval spare and repair parts.
“There appears to now be little to no US support for substantial Taiwan force modernization efforts,” US-Taiwan Business Council president Rupert Hammond-Chambers said in the statement.
The Biden administration had undertaken “the most significant narrowing of US-Taiwan security assistance” since the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act was passed, Hammond-Chambers said, adding: “We should expect to see mostly sustainment and munitions programs” in terms of defense sales to Taiwan through the remainder of Biden’s term in office.
Photo: Tyrone Siu, Reuters
“One significant impact this approach will have is to constrain force modernization for entire areas of Taiwan’s military capability,” said the council, which includes defense contractors among its members.
The council was responding to the latest announcement of a possible defense package to Taiwan of naval spare and repair parts at an estimated cost of US$120 million, the fourth since Biden took office in January last year.
The US Defense Security Cooperation Agency on Wednesday announced that it has notified the US Congress of the proposed sale, which includes unclassified spare and repair parts for ships and ship systems, logistical technical assistance and other elements to sustain Taiwan’s surface-vessel fleet.
The US-Taiwan Business Council said it welcomes the announcement and acknowledges the need to sustain Taiwan’s military.
However, the council said that Taiwan’s military is likely to see a “loss of infrastructure, hollowing out of operational experience and the loss of decades of expertise” as a result of the Biden administration’s approach.
Last month, the council said that the Biden administration’s new defense sale policy to Taiwan — which focuses more on investing in Taiwan’s “asymmetric capabilities” — would undermine Taiwan’s defense capability.
The administration approved its first weapons sale to Taiwan in August last year — a US$750 million deal for 40 Paladin M109A6 self-propelled howitzers.
This was followed by a US$100 million package in February that included equipment and services to support participation in a Patriot missile program.
The third, in April, was a US$95 million package of equipment and services to maintain Taiwan’s Patriot system.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching