Military forces need a shake-up

By Wang Jyh-perng 王志鵬

本文刊登於 Nov 21, 2010 Taipei Times- Page 8

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2010/11/21/2003489033

While delivering a speech during a symposium for military officials at the National Defense University on Nov. 3, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) reiterated that Taiwan’s strategy should be to develop a military that is strong, skilled and specialized, despite being small, and to deter China using asymmetric and innovative warfare.

However, the constant repetition of these slogans cannot hide the fact that Taiwan’s military continues to be weakened. If we take a look at national defense developments over the last two years, we see that the US has become more sensitive when it comes to selling arms to Taiwan, while Ma has not delivered on his pre-election promises in relation to national defense policy.

In a commentary by Michael Chase, an associate research professor at the Naval War College in the US published by the US-based Jamestown Foundation on March 5, Chase stated clearly that he believed Taiwan’s military must make three important changes, as soon as possible. He said the first was to rethink our national defense strategies and develop innovative asymmetric warfare capabilities in response to the ever-growing military imbalance between Taiwan and China. The second was that Taiwan should strengthen its disaster relief capabilities. Last, he felt Taiwan must invest vast amounts of money to establish a military enlistment system.

Let us take a look at Ma’s election promises in regard to national defense policy. So far, the national defense budget has not been lowered to 3 percent of GDP as Ma promised, while the military enlistment system must be postponed because of a lack of adequate funding and suitable candidates. The national defense budget makes it impossible to maintain the 4:3:3 proportion between military staff, operations and investments.

Furthermore, ongoing downsizing has resulted in uncertainty and constant changes in the structure of national defense organization, causing the different military branches to fight with each other for resources. Ma has not delivered on even one of his election promises and it does not look like he will during the remainder of his term in office.

Ma says asymmetric warfare means the active development of feasible ways to strike at an enemy’s fatal weaknesses. However, a look at the six items the US sold Taiwan in October 2008 for US$6.46 billion and the five items sold in January for US$6.39 billion, shows that these deals were all secured by the military before Ma came to power. In addition, these items barely help maintain Taiwan’s existing defense capabilities, as there were no forward-looking items that could help establish a future deterrent.

Ma continues to ask the US to sell Taiwan F-16C/D fighter aircraft, but he is only really doing this for show and some experts and academics have criticized him for this in the past.

A recent example is US military expert Richard Fisher who said in February that even if the US government decided to sell F-16C/D fighter aircraft to Taiwan, the deterrence effect would only be temporary. Fisher also said that over the next decade, China will be able to gain fifth-generation fighters with much stronger capabilities than F-16s and that Taiwan should think about building up more forward-looking military capabilities. Mei Fu-hsing (梅復興), director of the US-based Taiwan Security Analysis Center, has also published an article asking whether the Ma administration is using the US’ pending military arms sales as bargaining chips.

The best example of how money is being wasted can be seen from the 30 Apache helicopters and 60 Black Hawk helicopters that were purchased, an excessive number, while it was impossible to buy specialized aircraft for search and rescue operations instead.

As far as non-traditional security is concerned, Typhoon Megi, which didn’t even make landfall in Taiwan, still caused severe damage and the loss of many lives. Airborne special forces mobilized large numbers of ground troops to provide assistance and the navy also sent out minehunter ships and Knox-class ships to assist in underwater and surface searches.

These rescue efforts were very costly and very labor and time consuming. Yet they were still criticized. The main reason for this criticism was that the equipment, capabilities and training were not designed with disaster relief in mind.

However, when facing future environmental changes around the globe and the more severe and more frequent disasters that could result from these changes, we will have to rely on large amounts of military manpower and capabilities. Last year, the National Defense Report listed disaster prevention and rescue as a central mission for the military. However, this is very difficult at the moment, given current abilities.

Therefore, the military must be able to relate to different types and levels of operation. They need to start by establishing specialized equipment and capabilities that can be used interchangeably during both war and peace times.

Apart from increasing disaster relief training, they also need to look at their skills and limitations in a pragmatic way. They should also think about merging national defense with diplomacy from the viewpoints of humanitarian aid and multilateral relations and come up with modes of mutual aid assistance that can be implemented quickly between different countries during military emergencies.

Wang Jyh-perng is an associate research fellow at the Association for Managing Defense and Strategies.

TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON