By J. Michael Cole
Taiwan’s politics are proving ruinous for the country’s national defense. Here’s what needs to be done.
Disclosure: The author is an employee of the Thinking Taiwan Foundation, a think tank launched by Tsai Ing-wen in 2012. The views expressed in this article are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the institutions with which he is affiliated.
If there is one subject that should never get sucked into the morass of Taiwan’s electoral campaigns, it is national defense. Irrespective of ideology or political preferences, politicians should always seek to transcend party politics and work together to ensure that the island-nation’s armed forces are fully prepared to meet the security challenges that confront Taiwan. However, Taiwan being Taiwan, even national security is politicized, and now a row has emerged over the nation’s shift to an all-volunteer force (AVF), with one side accusing the other of trying to reinstate conscription.
The sad thing is that as politicians try to score political points ahead of the 2016 presidential election, Taiwan’s AVF program continues to face many challenges. Despite improvements in salaries, service-extension stipends, and slick publicity drives, lower-than-expected enlistment has forced the Ministry of National Defense (MND) to proceeded with a streamlining of the basic force that some critics say may have gone too far. Facing sluggish recruitment in the initial phase of the AVF program, the military was forced to postpone the shift to AVF, first planned for 2015, to 2017, and to reduce the expected active force from the planned 215,000 soldiers to between 170,000 and 180,000, or about 0.8 percent of the population.
For 2013, MND had hoped to recruit 28,000 soldiers; however, about one-third of that number actually signed up. Consequently, as the decision was made to further reduce the active force, the annual recruitment goals were also lowered. Contacted for the latest recruitment figures, Maj.-Gen. David Lo, spokesman for Taiwan’s MND, told The Diplomat that a total of 15,024 men and women joined the military in 2014, or 142.4 percent of the target for that year (a little over 10,500). Lo said the military was planning to recruit 14,000 soldiers in 2015 and about the same number in 2016, the last year before the AVF program is scheduled to come into force. As of April 23, a total of 4,468 people have signed up, or 31.9 percent of the annual objective. At this rate, total recruitment for 2015 would be 14,432.
Although MND surpassed its recruitment goal for 2014 and will likely do so in 2015 and 2016, those objectives were half that set for 2013, prompting some to ask whether Taiwan would have enough soldiers to defend the nation.
Read the full story at The Diplomat