The military’s combat-ready troops have an average personnel-to-division rate of about 20 percent understrength, said Legislative Yuan’s Budget Center in a report reviewing the Ministry of National Defense’s fiscal 2025 budget showed.
The Budget Center said that while national defense spending has increased to record highs in recent years, there is a worrying trend of a declining number of volunteer soldiers.
The ministry’s fiscal year 2025 budget showed that total positions in the all-voluntary force would decrease by 5,486 people, or about 11 battalions, compared with this year, it said.
Photo: Taipei Times
The reduction in personnel is mainly comprised of low-level non-commissioned officers (NCOs) and privates first class, it said, adding that the military might lose more than 9 percent of its NCOs and senior soldiers.
While the ministry has not explained the reduction in funding, the center surmised that the number of recruits for the military in the first half of this year is lower than in previous years.
The military achieved its goal of becoming a volunteer-only force in 2019, seeing a total of 164,000 individuals enlisted in 2021, it said.
Total enlisted personnel in 2022 and last year dropped 5,492 and 4,706, respectively, and as of June, the total number of enlisted personnel has fallen 1,801, it said.
This year’s enlisted personnel is the lowest since 2018, it said.
Category one combat troops were about 20 percent understrength as of June, it said.
Category one refers to company-level troops in the army’s infantry, mortars and artillery, and armor units; navy personnel serving aboard ships and the marines; the air force’s anti-air units; the 202nd Military Police Command and anti-air missile command.
About 11 separate military equipment purchases are coming to a close over the next few years, and the lack of personnel to operate said equipment is worrying, the center said.
The center urged the ministry to mull how to resolve the issue of understrength combat forces before allocating funds to purchase high-cost military equipment.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS