The US should double the size of its joint training team in Taiwan in addition to providing military equipment as part of efforts to help Taiwan’s military face threats posed by China, retired US Navy rear admiral Mark Montgomery said on Thursday.
Montgomery made the remarks as a witness at a hearing of the US House of Representatives Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the US and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Washington.
“We absolutely have to grow the joint training team in Taiwan,” Montgomery said, after retired US Army Pacific commanding general Charles Flynn explained the importance of training.
Photo: screen grab from the committee’s YouTube channel
“That’s a US team there. That’s about 500 people. Now it needs to be 1,000 if we’re going to give them billions of dollars in assistance, tens of billions of dollars’ worth of US gear. It makes sense that we’d be over there training and working,” said Montgomery, who retired in 2017 and works as senior director in the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation.
Flynn, who retired in November last year, cited the Harpoon anti-ship missile launching systems as an example.
In 2020, US President Donald Trump announced sales of 100 units of land-based Harpoon launchers to Taiwan during his first term in office.
“We can give them 400 Harpoon systems, but they, if they don’t have 400 crews that actually know how to man them, use them, employ them, site them and have a primary, alternate and supplementary firing position. It doesn’t matter how many things they have,” Flynn told the committee.
Flynn and Montgomery were responding to questions from US Representative Dusty Johnson, who said: “If America weakens its commitment to defending Taiwan, then Taiwan may lose the resolve to resist,” quoting an article in The Economist.
Johnson also asked whether there is a broad census in Taiwan, given the “split government.”
Flynn noted Taiwan’s efforts to produce indigenous weapons and said he has seen positive developments “from the political side and the military side” over the past three-and-a-half to four years.
“We have momentum, and we can ill afford to lose the momentum,” he said.
Thursday’s hearing began with Flynn, Montgomery and former US deputy secretary of state Kurt Campbell giving statements before they were questioned by lawmakers.
“I think it is critical that you focus on what Taiwan needs to do and how we need to support Taiwan, remember that we are the ultimate backstop, and we must keep our capabilities shifting more of our capacity to the Indo-Pacific, recognizing that this is where the ultimate challenge to American power is in the 21st century,” Campbell said in his opening statement.
China has reserved offshore airspace in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea from March 27 to May 6, issuing alerts usually used to warn of military exercises, although no such exercises have been announced, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported yesterday. Reserving such a large area for 40 days without explanation is an “unusual step,” as military exercises normally only last a few days, the paper said. These alerts, known as Notice to Air Missions (Notams), “are intended to inform pilots and aviation authorities of temporary airspace hazards or restrictions,” the article said. The airspace reserved in the alert is
NAMING SPAT: The foreign ministry called on Denmark to propose an acceptable solution to the erroneous nationality used for Taiwanese on residence permits Taiwan has revoked some privileges for Danish diplomatic staff over a Danish permit that lists “Taiwan” as “China,” Eric Huang (黃鈞耀), head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of European Affairs, told a news conference in Taipei yesterday. Reporters asked Huang whether the Danish government had responded to the ministry’s request that it correct the nationality on Danish residence permits of Taiwanese, which has been listed as “China” since 2024. Taiwan’s representative office in Denmark continues to communicate with the Danish government, and the ministry has revoked some privileges previously granted to Danish representatives in Taiwan and would continue to review
More than 6,000 Taiwanese students have participated in exchange programs in China over the past two years, despite the Mainland Affairs Council’s (MAC) “orange light” travel advisory, government records showed. The MAC’s publicly available registry showed that Taiwanese college and university students who went on exchange programs across the Strait numbered 3,592 and 2,966 people respectively. The National Immigration Agency data revealed that 2,296 and 2,551 Chinese students visited Taiwan for study in the same two years. A review of the Web sites of publicly-run universities and colleges showed that Taiwanese higher education institutions continued to recruit students for Chinese educational programs without
The first bluefin tuna of the season, brought to shore in Pingtung County and weighing 190kg, was yesterday auctioned for NT$10,600 (US$333.5) per kilogram, setting a record high for the local market. The auction was held at the fish market in Donggang Fishing Harbor, where the Siaoliouciou Island-registered fishing vessel Fu Yu Ching No. 2 delivered the “Pingtung First Tuna” it had caught for bidding. Bidding was intense, and the tuna was ultimately jointly purchased by a local restaurant and a local company for NT$10,600 per kilogram — NT$300 ,more than last year — for a total of NT$2.014 million. The 67-year-old skipper
RSS