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A mock defense of Taiwan’s bustling Suao Bay naval base in May, conducted as a part of the Han Kuang, or “Chinese Glory,” live-fire military exercises, presented a snapshot of Taiwan’s evolving military. New capabilities were on display, but the failures of antiquated weapons stole the show. Civilian officials in the viewing stand demanded explanations, a far cry from the island’s long history of military domination under Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.

Taiwan’s progress was apparent, but so was the array of challenges in military strategy, procurement and personnel reform if the island is going to be able to defend itself in the future.

These challenges are rooted in the transformation of Taiwan’s military strategy since 2000, when Chen Shui-bian of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) beat the long-ruling Kuomintang (KMT) to become president of the Republic of China (ROC). Chen inherited an army-centric military that had been designed over nearly 50 years of KMT rule to focus on the defense of the island’s physical territory. Chen feared this focus would turn Taiwan’s densely populated cities into urban combat zones if conflict with China ever came, and instead decided to pursue “decisive offshore operations” that would employ air and naval power to carry the fight into the Taiwan Strait and, if necessary, to the mainland. The immediate obstacle for Chen’s strategy was Washington’s reluctance to sell Taipei the types of advanced weapons systems necessary for such a defensive strategy after the U.S. promised to reduce its sales to Taiwan in a 1982 Sino-American joint communiqué.

The election of President Bush provided Chen an opportunity to break through this barrier. In April 2001, Bush famously declared that he would do “whatever it takes” to defend the island, despite the absence of a formal security treaty, and approved a series of arms sales that by the summer of 2003 would amount to $30 billion on the table. This flood of offers followed two decades during which Taipei had never processed a single purchase from the U.S. greater than $500 and quickly blew bureaucratic circuits at Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, which found itself responsible for mountains of documentation on planning, programming, budgets and systems analysis.

As Washington sent a slew of arms offers in Taiwan’s direction, the ROC was undergoing fundamental reforms to the way its military did business and related to its civilian leadership. In 2002 and 2003, Taiwan’s legislature, the Legislative Yuan (LY), adopted the National Defense Law and National Defense Organization Act, which former U.S. Defense Department official Mark Stokes has compared to being “equal to the U.S. National Defense Act of 1947 and the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 combined.” These laws established firm civilian leadership over the military, creating an institution inside the Ministry of National Defense equivalent to Washington’s Office of the Secretary of Defense — a civilian organization to oversee almost every facet of Taiwan’s defense policy.

While the newly reorganized bureaucracy was grappling with a previously unimaginable series of arms sales offers, Taiwan’s political leadership was also trying to find its own bearings. Just as the KMT found itself in the unaccustomed role of the political opposition, the Legislative Yuan was newly empowered to exercise oversight and budgetary control over the government. When the Chen government requested that the LY approve a single $18 billion “special budget” to pay for the procurement of submarines, P-3C maritime patrol aircraft and Patriot missile batteries, the KMT balked. The subsequent stalemate over defense spending has begun to undermine Washington’s confidence in Taipei’s commitment to its own defense.

Although Taiwan’s military too often feels it is caught in the crossfire among these many changes, it is nonetheless taking substantive steps toward establishing a force that can execute the types of offshore operations it has been charged with conducting. When I visited Taipei in May to observe the 23rd annual Han Kuang exercises, I saw these changes first-hand, as well as the major barriers that Taiwan’s military must yet overcome.

Organizing for OffShore Operations

Since 2000, Taiwan’s strategy of decisive offshore operations has served multiple goals. It has sought to remove Taiwan’s population and economic centers from the battlefield. It has shifted power away from the army, a service that many DPP leaders identified as being an anti-democratic element of the old regime and bolstered the relative prestige of the navy and air force. Most importantly, it is also a response to the “revolution in military affairs,” a shift in war fighting that has left relatively static, army-centric forces vulnerable to more integrated militaries with strong air and naval capabilities — the model that Beijing is pursuing today.

The problem that such operations pose is that they require a military reorganization that is time-consuming, expensive, and necessitates fundamental changes in personnel and command structures. The Chinese term for this task captures the concept neatly: xinxihua, which translates to the clumsy English term, “informationalization.” The centerpiece of the Taiwanese military’s effort to catch up with the challenge of informationalization is the Po Sheng (Broad Victory) program, a $2.3 billion modernization effort launched in 2003 to enhance the C4ISR capabilities of its military.

The centrality of the Po Sheng program to Taiwan’s broader modernization effort is captured simply by the fact that for years, its aircraft and naval vessels could not effectively communicate with one another, its soldiers depended upon cell phones more than radios, and its central military command, the Joint Operations Control Center (JOCC), could not monitor military operations in real time. The net consequence of these deficiencies was that the goal of joint operations remained a dream: Without the means to share data and integrate command structures, the Taiwanese military services could not expect but to fight independently, implying a sequence of air, naval and land battles as each service met an invading force from the mainland.

Although Taiwan’s C4ISR program is a work in progress, its successes so far were demonstrated by the structure of the April 16-20 Command Post Exercise (CPX) conducted by the Taiwanese military as the first leg of the Han Kuang exercises. The CPX was an extensive, five-day war game that linked Taiwan’s various field headquarters to the JOCC, where game managers created a scenario that forced the military to respond to a rapidly evolving crisis scenario through the joint employment of Taiwan’s military forces.

The CPX posited a scenario set in 2012 in which mainland China launched a massive attack in response to Taipei’s intransigence toward Beijing’s demands for unification talks. The scenario captured the principal concerns of Taiwan’s defense leadership today. The mainland prefaced its assault with a massive missile barrage that destroyed much of the island’s infrastructure and military installations, and the two-week timeline of the hypothetical scenario represented Taipei’s fear that the mainland would attempt to execute an invasion before American forces could reach the theater.

In the CPX scenario, mainland China employed a two-phased strategy in its assault on Taiwan. The first phase was an air war in which Beijing sought to destroy Taiwan’s air defenses and wreak havoc on the Taiwanese government. China has invested heavily in means to target Taiwan’s air defense in recent years, including its purchase of Israeli-made Harpy anti-radiation drones, which are designed to home in on and destroy the radiation emissions of air defense radars. Even where Taiwan’s radar systems are not vulnerable, it suffers from a notable lack of logistical support for its air defenses. Many surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems are outdated, and it can be difficult for Taipei to procure spare missiles from Washington.

Over the initial days of combat, the CPX scenario predicted that the mainland would seek to exploit its suppression of Taiwanese air defenses to establish air superiority over the Taiwan Strait. China already possesses some 400 fourth-generation aircraft, comprising advanced Su-27, J-11 and Su-30 fighters poised to attack Taiwan, and is investing to upgrade the rest of its air fleet by 2012. While ever more advanced Chinese aircraft patrol the skies, they will be supported from the ground by S-300PMU2 surface-to-air missile batteries, which will be able to strike any aircraft flying over Taiwan’s west coast.

The final portion of China’s first-phase operations was the employment of its short- and medium-range ballistic missile batteries, as well as airstrikes and special operations forces, to strike a wide array of civilian and military targets on the island. These attacks disrupted the government and forced Taiwan’s military to seek shelter in hardened bunkers. While these attacks occurred, the bulk of Taiwan’s military was sheltered on the east coast of the island, where PRC submarine forces were attempting to force a blockade on the movement of ships into and out of port. Although the CPX planners assumed that Taiwan would be bloodied in the opening phase of a war, they also argued that it would be possible to save the bulk of the force.

In the second phase of the exercise, Chinese forces attempted a major amphibious landing on Taiwanese soil, forcing the ROC military to employ its decisive offshore battle concept in a joint naval-air interdiction of the amphibious force. Having assembled the bulk of its naval and air power on the east coast of Taiwan, the military had a single-shot opportunity to interdict and destroy the amphibious Chinese force. According to CPX planners, the penultimate battle was so successful in the game that the red force had to be reconstituted for the following land battle. The stakes involved in this single battle were emphasized when Taiwan’s deputy chief of general staff for operations and planning told The Associated Press afterward that because of China’s superior submarines and jet fighters, “we would suffer great damage to our force.”

The successful interdiction of the Chinese amphibious force was also a source of much controversy in Washington when Taiwanese briefers announced after the exercise that their military had employed a “tactical shore-based missile for fire suppression” to buy the striking force a window when China’s missile forces, radar stations and airfields would be temporarily crippled. This euphemism was widely interpreted to be a reference to the HsiungFeng-2E (HF-2E) land attack cruise missile that Taiwan reportedly has been developing for several years, and immediately prompted U.S. criticism. National Security Council official Dennis Wilder stated that “offensive capabilities on either side of the Strait are destabilizing and therefore not in the interest of peace and security,” and called on neither Taipei nor Beijing to develop ballistic or cruise missiles.

Despite Washington’s criticism, Taipei will likely continue to develop the HF-2E or similar systems that allow it to attack the Chinese mainland directly. According to the predictions of the CPX scenario, after all, the capability to strike China’s air defenses will be a central component to any interdiction of an amphibious force headed for Taiwan. More important, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense believes that the Han Kuang CPX exercise demonstrated that the offshore decisive battle strategy is the key to victory if Beijing should attempt to invade the island. But no plan survives contact with the enemy, and it remains to be seen whether Taiwan will develop the necessary capabilities for its actual forces to conduct the type of interdiction operation that was the key to the CPX scenario victory.

The Challenge of Procurement

Even the most finely tuned strategy cannot succeed if the military is unprepared to execute it, and on May 15-18, the Taiwanese military conducted a series of field training exercises (FTX) to test the concepts developed in the April CPX simulation. The Han Kuang FTX is the island’s largest annual live-fire exercise and is, indeed, one of the rare opportunities for Taiwan’s troops to use live fire in their training. The first, and most telegenic, exercise was the landing of pairs of fighter aircraft — F-16s, Mirage 2000s and Indigenous Defense Fighters (IDFs) — on a strip of Taiwan’s main highway near Taizhong on April 15 to demonstrate how the ROC Air Force would protect its aircraft even if its airfields were destroyed by Chinese missile and special operations forces attacks. The islandwide exercises soon expanded to include offshore defenses, engagements with mock paratroopers and preparations at bases on Taiwan’s east coast to break out of a blockade.

The May 16 exercises at Suao Naval Base in Ilan County were one portion of these exercises, testing the type of interdiction battle that Taiwan is betting its victory in a real conflict with the mainland. The Suao exercise involved some 2,163 military personnel from the three services and was conducted as a series of missile launches at aircraft drones and ships from a combination of air, ground and sea-based platforms. The action involving Kidd-class destroyers occurred some 72 kilometers from the viewing stand but gradually ranged into Suao Bay, where the majority of interceptions involved direct fires from AH-1 Cobra attack helicopters, as well as a combination of F-16s, Mirage 2000s and IDFs.

The beginning of the exercises was wholly successful, as a variety of naval platforms and all of the aircraft involved in the exercise destroyed their targets, but the exercise took a turn for the worse when the ROC Army’s missile corps repeatedly failed to strike targets with Hawk, Chaparral and Avenger missiles. The medium-range surface-to-air Hawk missile was tested relatively early in the exercise, but one of the missiles failed upon firing and crash-landed into a cemetery before reaching the coast. The Chaparral, a ground-launched version of the air-to-air Sidewinder missile, had a less spectacular failure when the first missile launched failed to hit its assigned target, necessitating a successful strike by a backup missile.

The most unsatisfactory mark was posted by an Avenger missile system that failed to hit its target drone at all. Using a Humvee-launched version of the Stinger missile, the Avenger operators tried twice to strike a relatively low and slowly flying drone target, failing on both attempts. The drone made its prescribed flight path over Suao Bay, turned and returned to the ocean, presumably having dropped its imaginary payload somewhere near the viewing stand.

The failure of the missile strikes at Suao Bay is a reminder that if the Taiwanese government is going to fully implement a strategy of pushing future battles with China offshore, it must have the necessary military equipment to do so. The mixed fleet of fighter aircraft delivered over the 1990s is a useful start, and the Kidd-class destroyers are a major step forward for Taiwan’s navy, but the country still faces several major capability gaps.

The first of these is the threat posed by China’s growing missile capabilities, which the Taiwanese Ministry of National Defense estimates has almost doubled since 2000 to nearly 800 Dongfeng-11A and Dongfeng-15A short- and medium-range missiles. In 2001, the U.S. and Taiwan agreed to a two-tracked response to this missile threat. The first track emphasizes hardened C4ISR and other continuity of government measures to ensure that even a significant missile strike will not fundamentally cripple Taiwan. The second track was the combined upgrading of Taiwan’s existing Patriot missile launchers to Patriot Advance Capability 3 (PAC-3) batteries, as well as the purchase of six additional PAC-3 fire units.

The PAC-3 offer was ultimately included in the “special budget” that Chen submitted to the LY in late 2003 and that included funding to develop a diesel-electric submarine program and purchase P-3C maritime patrol aircraft. The special budget stalled as the KMT-controlled legislature dug its heels in and focused instead on a bruising political fight with Chen through the 2004 election and beyond. Only in June did the LY pass a budget to cover the upgrade for its existing Patriot batteries, losing some four years on the procurement of a vital defensive system that can compliment such aging systems as the Hawk and Chaparral, which were phased out of the U.S. military in the 1990s.

The passage of the 2007 defense budget also raised an additional procurement challenge as Taiwan looks at its mixed fleet of F-16s, Mirage 2000 and IDF aircraft. In June, the LY approved a $400 million budget to begin purchasing American-made F-16C/D aircraft, a significant upgrade on its existing air forces. Moreover, the added F-16s would complement the broader Po Sheng C4ISR effort, because it would increase the number of Taiwan’s fighters that are directly tied into the JOCC’s operational picture through the Link-16 tactical data communications system.

Despite these advantages of procuring the new aircraft, Taiwan’s request for new F-16 sales has been shunned by Washington in response to a brewing political fight over the country’s planned referendum on whether to apply to the U.N. under the name of “Taiwan,” instead of the constitutional title of “Republic of China.” In short, while the U.S. has accused Taiwan of treating defense spending as a domestic political football, it does the same when it tries to use the approval of sales as a stick or carrot in its management of cross-Strait relations.

Procurement will remain a litmus test of Taiwan’s ability to implement its national defensive strategy. Continuing to build on the June 2007 budget is one way for Taiwan to make a more credible demonstration in this regard, but even a well-equipped Taiwanese military will face significant obstacles to achieving its maximum possible effectiveness.

When President Chen first arrived in office in April 2000, he inherited a military that was staffed with some 400,000 conscripts who served between two- and three-year terms based upon their military specialties. The troops perceived this system as unfair, unnecessary, and corrupt — a 2001 survey revealed that some 50 percent of enlisted men believed that if they had come from richer families, they could have avoided military service altogether, while only 15 percent viewed conscription as vital to national survival. For Chen’s strategy of fighting Taiwan’s defense, conscription was inefficient, a drain on precious budgetary resources and a system that bolstered the army’s traditional domination among the military services.

The Chen government decided to shift away from the expensive and inefficient manpower system by simultaneously dismantling the conscription system and investing in the development of an all-volunteer force (AVF). Overall troop numbers have fallen by more than 125,000 men, and conscription commitments have fallen precipitously in recent years to only 12 months from 2008, but creating an AVF has proved more difficult. Volunteer recruitment began in 2004, but less than 30,000 soldiers have been recruited for service to date. The promised pay raises for volunteers have been difficult to implement, and the military’s claims that it will have a force that is 60 percent volunteer by 2008 is only possible by counting officers and NCOs who re-enlisted following the end of their conscription terms.

The result of this process is that the enlistment durations of many Taiwanese soldiers, sailors and airmen has fallen in recent years, but there has been little increase in volunteer troops to fill the gap. As a result, Taiwan’s weapons systems will soon be manned by troops who only have two to three months of training before shipping out to serve their nine-month durations of service. The implications for Taiwan’s military preparedness were demonstrated at exercises I attended on May 17 at the Hukou army base in Hsinchu County, about 50 kilometers southwest of Taipei.

The Hukou exercise involved a simulated airborne invasion in which the red force troops captured a series of Taiwanese command posts, followed by a simulated blue force counter-landing and armored assault. Because of a combination of rainy weather and perhaps responding to a training accident the week before in which the crash of an F-5F Tiger II trainer killed a three Singaporean soldiers on the base, there were no actual airborne troop maneuvers (helicopters flew in and out without carrying any soldiers) or strikes by F-16 and IDF fighters that were supposed to be supporting the attack.

The culmination of the Hukou exercise was a joint maneuver by M60A3 Patton tanks, CM21 Armored Personnel Carriers (APCs) and infantry troops to destroy targets and take objectives downrange from the observing stand. To some degree, the exercise reflected Taiwan’s military tradition of doing more with less: the CM21 APCs were built indigenously by adapting the American-made M113 armored personnel carrier hull to include a set of side gun hatches that permit the soldiers traveling inside to fire from the vehicle.

But the Hukou exercise was also notable because the lines of maneuver for the units participating in the final joint armor and infantry assault exercise were strictly proscribed in advance and diverged toward individual target ranges rather than a single objective. As a consequence, the participating units did not demonstrate the ability to provide covering fire while moving forward in alternating lanes of advance. The commanding officer of the drill explained afterwards that he had ordered the troops and tanks “not to proceed at top speed, because it is extremely muddy and slippery because of the rain,” but the exercise still raised questions about the progress of training Taiwan’s troops for complex, joint operations in the future.

Reflecting the unpopularity of the conscription system, KMT presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou promised in a September 2007 speech that he will move Taiwan to a wholly all-volunteer force within three to four years if he is elected, but this is a challenge that the DPP government has pursued for years with only partial success. Moving from conscription to an AVF is a tremendous challenge, and the country will very likely maintain some form of conscript system to man its reserves even after the transition is complete. But the task for Taipei is clear — it must develop a sufficiently robust personnel structure to operate the ever more sophisticated weapon systems that it seeks to deploy.

U.S. Role in Taiwan Defense

Taiwan’s 2007 Han Kuang exercises were a test of the military strategy of taking Taiwan’s defense offshore and fighting jointly. The exercises demonstrated that such a strategy is within Taiwan’s grasp but also served as a reminder that Taiwan’s military is yet undergoing a wrenching transformation as it adapts to greater civilian control and a more professionalized force, carries out major arms purchases, and maintains an increasingly antiquated arsenal. This effort will require years before it is completed to the satisfaction of policymakers in either Taipei or Washington, be they DPP or KMT, Republican or Democrat.

The U.S. has played a positive, bipartisan role in this effort. The decision to support major upgrades to Taiwan’s C4ISR system dates back to the latter years of the administration of President Clinton, and the American interest in Taiwan’s possessing a credible self-defense will long outlast the final years of the Bush administration. Washington can take concrete steps in guaranteeing that this interest continues to be realized.

As Taiwan continues to improve and test its C4ISR capabilities, its potential to serve as an ad hoc coalition partner in the event of either a cross-Strait crisis or a humanitarian disaster in the region will grow significantly. Under the Po Sheng program, Taiwan has procured a set of capabilities that can plug directly into the U.S. C4ISR system in the western Pacific, both providing and receiving critical data when the two sides work together. If the U.S. is to bolster this latent ability, it must enhance the level of dialogue between the two sides. One example would be to lift the nearly 30-year ban on visits to Taiwan by serving U.S. flag and general officers, so the managers of American command-and-control systems could visit their colleagues at Taiwan’s JOCC and field headquarters.

The U.S. should also support Taiwan’s continued acquisition of weapons systems for its defense. Although Taiwan’s defense spending as a share of GDP remains at a relatively low 2.7 percent, both the DPP and KMT candidates in March’s presidential election have indicated that they plan to increase it past 3 percent. As Taiwan seeks to shoulder a larger share of the defense burden, Washington should also play a more productive role.

The recent experience with Taiwan’s request to purchase F-16s is a clear example of how not to handle this relationship. Taipei’s regular arms purchases should be handled as a matter of course in U.S. security assistance and sales programs, not as an instrument for punishing or rewarding Taipei’s behavior on tangential matters. Likewise, the CPX seems to have demonstrated a useful role for a Taiwanese land-attack cruise missile. Washington may not prefer that Taiwan develop that particular capability, but it is not obvious why Taipei should be expected to foreswear options for striking military facilities on the mainland while it lives under the shadow of Beijing’s growing missiles force.

Finally, the Han Kuang exercises serve as a reminder that although Taiwan aims to defend itself through the initial stages of a conflict with the People’s Republic of China, its military would suffer tremendous attrition during such a conflict. The U.S. must be prepared to accept a leading role in the defense of Taiwan, including providing a major naval and tactical air presence in defense, even in the face of advanced Chinese submarine and SAM capabilities. Surviving Taiwanese forces would also require significant logistical support after the opening weeks of a conflict. While no one seeks a war in the Taiwan Strait, such a scenario is yet a plausible outcome and one that demands Washington remain prepared.