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.
The military has spotted two Chinese warships operating in waters near Penghu County in the Taiwan Strait and sent its own naval and air forces to monitor the vessels, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) said. Beijing sends warships and warplanes into the waters and skies around Taiwan on an almost daily basis, drawing condemnation from Taipei. While the ministry offers daily updates on the locations of Chinese military aircraft, it only rarely gives details of where Chinese warships are operating, generally only when it detects aircraft carriers, as happened last week. A Chinese destroyer and a frigate entered waters to the southwest
A magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck off the coast of Yilan County at 8:39pm tonight, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said, with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was 38.7km east-northeast of Yilan County Hall at a focal depth of 98.3km, the CWA’s Seismological Center said. The quake’s maximum intensity, which gauges the actual physical effect of a seismic event, was a level 4 on Taiwan’s 7-tier intensity scale, the center said. That intensity level was recorded in Yilan County’s Nanao Township (南澳), Hsinchu County’s Guansi Township (關西), Nantou County’s Hehuanshan (合歡山) and Hualien County’s Yanliao (鹽寮). An intensity of 3 was
Instead of focusing solely on the threat of a full-scale military invasion, the US and its allies must prepare for a potential Chinese “quarantine” of Taiwan enforced through customs inspections, Stanford University Hoover fellow Eyck Freymann said in a Foreign Affairs article published on Wednesday. China could use various “gray zone” tactics in “reconfiguring the regional and ultimately the global economic order without a war,” said Freymann, who is also a nonresident research fellow at the US Naval War College. China might seize control of Taiwan’s links to the outside world by requiring all flights and ships entering or leaving Taiwan
The next minimum wage hike is expected to exceed NT$30,000, President William Lai (賴清德) said yesterday during an award ceremony honoring “model workers,” including migrant workers, at the Presidential Office ahead of Workers’ Day today. Lai said he wished to thank the awardees on behalf of the nation and extend his most sincere respect for their hard work, on which Taiwan’s prosperity has been built. Lai specifically thanked 10 migrant workers selected for the award, saying that although they left their home countries to further their own goals, their efforts have benefited Taiwan as well. The nation’s industrial sector and small businesses lay
RSS