The navy has requested NT$616.2 million (US$19.27 million) for new dry dock cranes to help enhance its domestic wartime ship repair capacity, it said on Sunday.
Under a defense budget proposal for fiscal year 2024 submitted to the legislature, the navy plans to spend NT$377.7 million in 2025 and NT$377.9 million in 2026 to acquire the cranes.
Although it did not disclose the technical specifications of the purchases or say which supplier it would use, the navy said that the new cranes would allow damaged warships to be repaired more efficiently to better support the military.
Photo: Ann Wang, Reuters
An assessment released in March last year by the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Industrial Cooperation Program showed that Taiwan might be able to manufacture dry dock cranes domestically.
Taiwan’s naval shipbuilding capacity had progressed significantly in the past few years, the navy said, citing the domestically developed landing platform dock Yushan and the Tuo Chiang-class corvette.
More diverse vessels are either in production or being launched as part of the nation’s efforts to bolster its wartime readiness, it said.
In other news, the state-run Military News Agency last week reported that the military police is to debut its newly purchased heavy motorcycles in a military base opening event later this month.
The Taipei-based 202nd Military Police Regional Command’s Quick-Reaction Company is to showcase its new Indian Challenger motorcycles at a Sept. 24 “open house” event at an army base in Hsinchu County, it said.
The company is the only military unit in Taiwan equipped with heavy motorcycles.
It previously used 65 aging Japanese-made Yamaha Royal Stars, before the Military Police Command spent NT$65 million replacing them with US-made Indian Challengers.
The unit took delivery of them in November last year.
The military police is a separate branch of the armed forces tasked with protecting government leaders from assassination or capture, guarding strategic facilities, and conducting counterintelligence against enemy infiltrators, spies and saboteurs.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
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