Taiwan Mulls Lengthening Military ServiceVOA News
April 12, 2022 08:36
https://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2022/04/12/2022041200543.htmlRussia's invasion of Ukraine has brought renewed attention to whether Taiwan's civilian population would be ready to defend the island democracy if it ever faced an invading force from China.
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Most Taiwanese men are required to complete military service, learning basic defense skills with the aim of being able to assist Taiwan's professional military in the event of a war. The government has gradually reduced its military service requirement from two years to four months since the 1990s, but the Ministry of Defense has said that such a short training period may not be enough.
Women are not required to undergo the same training, although about 15 percent of the islands professional military is female. Male citizens also have the option of serving alternative service which is community service organized through the Ministry of the Interior.
Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng told reporters in late March that he would put forward a plan by the end of the year to bolster Taiwan's defenses, which could include extending national service. It's not uncommon in Taiwan to hear the current four-month military system described by young men as a kind of "summer camp" experience, and some citizens think that four months is too short to learn important skills.
Recent polling by the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation found that 78 percent of respondents aged 20 and older had "no confidence at all that Taiwan could defend itself." Another 75.9 percent of respondents aged 20 and over said they would support extending military service from four months to one year.
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Many analysts say it would be helpful if they were recalled as units and not as individuals, functioning like the U.S. National Guard. Male citizens are currently called up at random to review their training which makes it more difficult to maintain comradery. Some key changes, however, have already been made. The government is now testing a pilot plan to recall reservists for two stints of 14 days, up from a week or less to ensure that there is adequate timeto review skills.
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Lo Chih-cheng, a legislator from the Democratic People's Party who sits on the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, said the war in Ukraine has generated renewed discussion around the need for a "civilian defense force" or an "all-out defense force" that is separate from the military but capable of engaging in irregular warfare. "The current system of four months training, obviously, is too short to train people well prepared for that kind of urban warfare, so it's been discussed widely that maybe we need to extend the duration of our military training for young people," Lo told VOA.
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Ivan Kanapathy, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in the U.S., said that length of time spent in military service is not necessarily as important as the quality of training. "The reduction of Taiwanese conscription from
2 years to 4 months was fueled by popular recognition that conscripts were used for mundane manual labor and administrative duties rather than training for combat," he said by email. "Taiwan would have to allocate significantly more resources to live fire and tactical training if it were to reverse course."
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