The Taipei reserve brigade today entered its fourth day of a new 14-day training program at the Taipei Tennis Center in Neihu District (內湖), practicing formations for urban combat.
The training program, which started on Saturday, focused on company-level formations today, requiring participants to adjust to both the enemy and road conditions as practice for responding to emergency situations.
The reservists used trails to simulate forked roads and environments that could be encountered in urban combat.
Photo: Liu Yu-chieh, Taipei Times
They practiced different formations depending on mission needs and local conditions, including protective actions at intersections and the use of hand gestures common in urban warfare.
It is now the fourth year of the 14-day reserve training program, now fully rolled out across all county and city reserve units this year.
However, there are still combat reserve brigades that have kept the former five-to-seven-day training regime.
The Ministry of National Defense has selected the 206th reserve brigade to mobilize for this year’s Han Kuang exercises to verify the effectiveness of Taiwan’s reserves.
This is the first time a reserve brigade has been mobilized since the end of the Chinese Civil War.
In the past, individual companies or battalions, about 100 to 500 individuals, have been mobilized for the Han Kuang exercises, but a brigade is much larger at about 2,400 to 3,000, sources with knowledge of the matter said.
A magnitude 6.4 earthquake struck off the coast of Hualien County in eastern Taiwan at 7pm yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. The epicenter of the temblor was at sea, about 69.9km south of Hualien County Hall, at a depth of 30.9km, it said. There were no immediate reports of damage resulting from the quake. The earthquake’s intensity, which gauges the actual effect of a temblor, was highest in Taitung County’s Changbin Township (長濱), where it measured 5 on Taiwan’s seven-tier intensity scale. The quake also measured an intensity of 4 in Hualien, Nantou, Chiayi, Yunlin, Changhua and Miaoli counties, as well as
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The Taipei City Reserve Command yesterday initiated its first-ever 14-day recall of some of the city’s civilian service reservists, who are to undergo additional training on top of refresher courses. The command said that it rented sites in Neihu District (內湖), including the Taipei Tennis Center, for the duration of the camp to optimize tactical positioning and accommodate the size of the battalion of reservists. A battalion is made up of four companies of more than 200 reservists each, it said. Aside from shooting drills at a range in New Taipei City’s Linkou District (林口), the remainder of the training would be at