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.
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