豆腐蒸蛋的做法:What is the biggest threat to Taiwan's defens...

来源：百度文库 编辑：九乡新闻网 时间：2024/04/27 20:40:43

What is the biggest threat to Taiwan's defense?





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2011-4-18 11:14



Taiwan leader Ma Ying-jeou last week said Chinese mainland remains the biggest threat to Taiwan defense as the island was staging a grand military exercises in high style. However, Mr. Ma who is seeking reelection next year should look inwards. The setbacks and scandals eroding Taiwan military's capability and reputation deserve more considerations than mainland's missiles, whose presence is a strategic gesture in essence.


South China Morning Post--Taiwan's cut-price military

Taiwan's shoestring defence budget this year has left many wondering whether the island would survive a first strike if the mainland decided to attack.


With just NT$297.2 billion) earmarked for the sector, it's the third time in three years that military spending has fallen.


Worse still, it's left some questioning if there is enough in the kitty to replace compulsory service with an all-voluntary force, as Taiwan leader Ma Ying-jeou has pledged.


According to government data, the budget represents just 2.14 per cent of the island's estimated NT$13.73 trillion gross domestic product, and is short of the minimum 3 per cent of GDP that Ma set as a target in a presidential campaign pledge three years ago.


Since Ma succeeded pro-independence Chen Shui-bian as top leader in May 2008 and adopted an engagement policy towards the mainland, Taiwan's defence budget has shrunk by NT$43 billion - from NT$343 billion in 2008 to NT$316 billion in 2009 to NT$300 billion last year.


According to “Premier” Wu Den-yih, the budget was snipped by a further NT$3 billion or so this year to around NT$297 billion, a sum that he said the military would use to build a "trim, but powerful" force.


But the approach has raised doubts in many people, including lawmakers from both the ruling Kuomintang and opposition parties, that Taiwan's forces are financed well enough to defend the island in the event of an attack.

"What we have this year is just around 10 per cent of that of the mainland's spending," KMT legislator John Chiang Hsiao-yen said.


In March, Beijing announced a 12.7 per cent increase to 601.1 billion yuan in its military spending for this year. Taiwanese defence officials calculated that if mainland spending on hidden items such as nuclear storage, spaceship programmes and defence industry subsidies were included, that total would be two or three times greater.


Although Beijing’s defense paper says the mainland's budget increase and military expansion have nothing to do with threatening Taiwan, the mainland's military deployment, including more than 1,000 missiles targeting the island, remains a keen concern in Taiwan.


Tsai Teh-sheng, head of Taiwan's “National Security Bureau”, recently warned the mainland had begun deploying a new type of ballistic missile - the Dongfeng-16, which has considerable destructive power and severely threatens the island's security.


The island's top security chief said that with a range of 800-1,000 kilometres the missile was more powerful and advanced than the existing Dongfeng series of intermediate and intercontinental ballistic missiles built by the mainland to try to prevent Taiwan from declaring de jure independence.


Tsai said the mainland had also begun fielding the Dongfeng-21, which could defeat any US Navy vessels coming to Taiwan's assistance.


"They have already completed a number of tests on this new weapon," Tsai noted, referring to the anti-ship ballistic missile, which has a range of up to 2,993 kilometres and is capable of hitting moving targets with pinpoint precision.


Dubbed the "game changer" or the "aircraft carrier killer", military experts said the DF-21 could threaten the US carrier fleets' supremacy in the Pacific, especially if conflicts erupted in the Taiwan Strait or on the Korean Peninsula. Western countries had predicted it would take the mainland at least a decade before it could effectively deploy DF-21s.


More worrying to Taiwanese was a series of military stumbles, including corruption scandals involving some senior officials and the arrest of Major General Lo Hsien-che, who spied for the mainland. Those failures risk exposing a key Taiwan-US Pacific Command military strike information platform, which would shatter the morale of Taiwan's troops.


Coupled with the mainland's first test-flight of the J-20 stealth fighter jet in January, which shocked the world, and the substandard performance of a January 18 Taiwanese missile drill, in which six of the missiles fired missed their targets, critics have questioned whether the Taiwanese force could last two weeks before the Americans come to the rescue. Although Taiwan does not have formal diplomatic relations with the US, Washington has assured Taipei of a defensive weapon supply because of its strategic importance in the Taiwan Strait.


But others are more confident.


"Should there be a first strike, we should be able to resist the attack for at least two weeks," “Defence Minister” General Kao Hua-chu said.


Kao said that despite the mainland's expanded military, Taiwan would not engage in an arms race and would "make the best use of our military budget to defend ourselves".


“Premier” Wu also said Taiwan could not afford to invest billions of dollars to engage in an arms race with the mainland but "would build a trim but powerful force strong enough to protect Taiwan and fend off the enemy".


He said the government would continue seeking to acquire arms, including F-16 C/D version fighter jets, from the US to improve Taiwan's defensive capacity. Taipei, which has acquired the A/B versions of the fighter jets, has been pushing for the more powerful F-16 C/Ds.


Wu said that while Washington was still weighing whether to sell the C/D versions to Taiwan, the US was likely to help the island upgrade its A/B versions.


Another concern of Taiwanese legislators is whether the military's plan to replace the draft with an all-volunteer service by 2014 would force more spending on logistics and military procurement, resulting in poor weapons maintenance and a shortage of funds to buy new arms.


The all-volunteer force was part of an election campaign pledge by Ma in 2008, but the failure to meet Ma's promise of spending 3 per cent of the GDP on defence has also affected the implementation target of the formation of the all-volunteer force.


Wu said the government would find ways to address the funding problem for the all-volunteer force, including selling vacant plots of land owned by the ministry. But he was non-committal over whether the new system could start in 2014.


Shuai Hua-min, a KMT legislator and a retired army general, said that without the necessary funding, it was unlikely the all-volunteer force could start by 2014.


"Many of my colleagues in the legislature have agreed that if the military budget in 2012 still falls short of the 3 per cent of the GDP, we will stop reviewing the budget and send it back to the government for relisting," he said.


Military expert Arthur Ding Shu-fan, secretary general of the Taipei-based Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, said the military would probably have to postpone the start of the all-volunteer force by at least one year.


"In the wake of the legislative elections at the end of this year and the presidential poll in March next year, the focus of Ma's government is the economy and better living for the public because it is the stuff voters are most concerned about," he said.

He said Ma's mainland engagement policy, which has significantly reduced cross-strait tension, had allowed him to focus on the economy and pave the way for his re-election.


Cross-strait talks resumed in 2008, followed by economic exchanges and other non-political co-operation agreements.
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