The Ministry of the Interior is working to amend regulations around alternative military service to enhance civil defense resilience, Deputy Minister of the Interior Ma Shih-yuan (馬士元) said in an exclusive interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) published yesterday.
The ministry is working to increase training days for conscripts and reservists, and establish a third-level agency to institutionalize the Substitute Service Training and Management Center, Ma said.
As part of institutionalizing the center, the ministry hopes to collaborate with universities where enrollment is low to use their facilities and campuses, Ma said.
Photo: Huang Yun-hsuan, Taipei Times
“Alternative service is also a type of military service,” he said.
Since last year, compulsory service in the armed forces has been extended to one year, which includes alternative service, a substitute civilian service managed jointly by the Ministry of National Defense and the interior ministry.
Following regulations within the Act of Military Service System (兵役法), the interior ministry is to increase the basic training period from 15 to 26 days, including training in first aid, civil defense and disaster prevention, he said.
There are about 250,000 alternative service reservists in Taiwan, with the ministry aiming to recall and train 50,000 annually so that those who previously did not receive first aid, civil defense and disaster prevention training could enhance their skills, Ma said.
Additionally, the number of reservist recall training days would be increased from one to five, he added.
The 250,000 alternative service reservists would be recruited by ministries and agencies based on their expertise, with the goal being to be able to cooperate with local offices to assist in large-scale disaster recovery efforts, Ma said.
Defense resilience is not only for wartime, but also for disaster prevention, Ma added.
Taiwan Community Emergency Response Teams (T-CERT) would also be trained to operate decommissioned emergency response vehicles, such as fire trucks and ambulances, he added.
Building “whole-of-society defense resilience” does have some difficulties, Ma said, citing the example of Internet users asking “if war breaks out, should we surrender?”
Although the public should not be naive about war, surrendering without fighting is misguided, as any sort of invasion would have major ramifications for all of Taiwan’s citizens and could tear society apart, he said.
The most important aspect of resilience is deterrence, to ensure that hostile foreign forces know that an invasion of Taiwan would not be easy, Ma said.
ECHOVIRUS 11: The rate of enterovirus infections in northern Taiwan increased last week, with a four-year-old girl developing acute flaccid paralysis, the CDC said Two imported cases of chikungunya fever were reported last week, raising the total this year to 13 cases — the most for the same period in 18 years, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said yesterday. The two cases were a Taiwanese and a foreign national who both arrived from Indonesia, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The 13 cases reported this year are the most for the same period since chikungunya was added to the list of notifiable communicable diseases in October 2007, she said, adding that all the cases this year were imported, including 11 from
Prosecutors in New Taipei City yesterday indicted 31 individuals affiliated with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for allegedly forging thousands of signatures in recall campaigns targeting three Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers. The indictments stem from investigations launched earlier this year after DPP lawmakers Su Chiao-hui (蘇巧慧) and Lee Kuen-cheng (李坤城) filed criminal complaints accusing campaign organizers of submitting false signatures in recall petitions against them. According to the New Taipei District Prosecutors Office, a total of 2,566 forged recall proposal forms in the initial proposer petition were found during the probe. Among those
The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) today condemned the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) after the Czech officials confirmed that Chinese agents had surveilled Vice President Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) during her visit to Prague in March last year. Czech Military Intelligence director Petr Bartovsky yesterday said that Chinese operatives had attempted to create the conditions to carry out a demonstrative incident involving Hsiao, going as far as to plan a collision with her car. Hsiao was vice president-elect at the time. The MAC said that it has requested an explanation and demanded a public apology from Beijing. The CCP has repeatedly ignored the desires
The Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant’s license has expired and it cannot simply be restarted, the Executive Yuan said today, ahead of national debates on the nuclear power referendum. The No. 2 reactor at the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant in Pingtung County was disconnected from the nation’s power grid and completely shut down on May 17, the day its license expired. The government would prioritize people’s safety and conduct necessary evaluations and checks if there is a need to extend the service life of the reactor, Executive Yuan spokeswoman Michelle Lee (李慧芝) told a news conference. Lee said that the referendum would read: “Do