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.
There are 77 incidents of Taiwanese travelers going missing in China between January last year and last month, the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) said. More than 40 remain unreachable, SEF Secretary-General Luo Wen-jia (羅文嘉) said on Friday. Most of the reachable people in the more than 30 other incidents were allegedly involved in fraud, while some had disappeared for personal reasons, Luo said. One of these people is Kuo Yu-hsuan (郭宇軒), a 22-year-old Taiwanese man from Kaohsiung who went missing while visiting China in August. China’s Taiwan Affairs Office last month said in a news statement that he was under investigation
An aviation jacket patch showing a Formosan black bear punching Winnie the Pooh has become popular overseas, including at an aviation festival held by the Japan Air Self-Defense Force at the Ashiya Airbase yesterday. The patch was designed last year by Taiwanese designer Hsu Fu-yu (徐福佑), who said that it was inspired by Taiwan’s countermeasures against frequent Chinese military aircraft incursions. The badge shows a Formosan black bear holding a Republic of China flag as it punches Winnie the Pooh — a reference to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — who is dressed in red and is holding a honey pot with
Celebrations marking Double Ten National Day are to begin in Taipei today before culminating in a fireworks display in Yunlin County on the night of Thursday next week. To start the celebrations, a concert is to be held at the Taipei Dome at 4pm today, featuring a lineup of award-winning singers, including Jody Chiang (江蕙), Samingad (紀曉君) and Huang Fei (黃妃), Taipei tourism bureau official Chueh Yu-ling (闕玉玲) told a news conference yesterday. School choirs, including the Pqwasan na Taoshan Choir and Hngzyang na Matui & Nahuy Children’s Choir, and the Ministry of National Defense Symphony Orchestra, flag presentation unit and choirs,
China is attempting to subsume Taiwanese culture under Chinese culture by promulgating legislation on preserving documents on ties between the Minnan region and Taiwan, a Taiwanese academic said yesterday. China on Tuesday enforced the Fujian Province Minnan and Taiwan Document Protection Act to counter Taiwanese cultural independence with historical evidence that would root out misleading claims, Chinese-language media outlet Straits Today reported yesterday. The act is “China’s first ad hoc local regulations in the cultural field that involve Taiwan and is a concrete step toward implementing the integrated development demonstration zone,” Fujian Provincial Archives deputy director Ma Jun-fan (馬俊凡) said. The documents
RSS