Taiwan’s military struggles to adapt as China threat grows

Taiwan’s former top military official issued a dire warning last week. The armed forces lacked a clear strategy to defend the country against a Chinese attack and the president might not understand the conceptual thinking needed to counter that threat, said Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, former chief of the general staff.  

“Think strategically! Don’t limit yourself to thinking about operational details!” Lee urged the military as he launched his new book that argues Taiwan must refocus on the “asymmetric” defence strategy he introduced but has been diluted since he retired three years ago.

Lee praised President Tsai Ing-wen for attaching more importance to the armed forces than her predecessors, but laced his appreciation of her backing for his asymmetric strategy with scepticism. “Does she understand it? I am not sure,” he said.

The former military chief’s alarm highlights the inertia that has hindered efforts to strengthen Taiwan’s defences, experts say, and is rooted in its history as the army of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist party that ruled the country under martial law for decades. The struggle to reform has taken on a sudden urgency as China is ratcheting up military pressure on Taiwan.

“We have an authoritarian hangover and it has created a problem with civil-military relations, and it may be the most critical problem we have,” said Kitsch Liao, military and cyber affairs consultant for Doublethink Lab, a Taipei-based civil society group. “The reason is that the military used to be the armed wing of the KMT, just like the People’s Liberation Army is the armed wing of the Chinese Communist party.”

When Taiwan democratised in 1992, the Taiwan Garrison Command, the unit that enforced martial law until 1987, was disbanded. But further changes have been slow and incremental.

Dean Karalekas, an expert on civil-military relations in Taiwan at the University of Central Lancashire, said the military had “worked pretty hard to move forward, in their own way”. But he added: “The old structures are still in place, [and there is] resistance against structural and cultural change.”

The political officers installed in each military unit to monitor loyalty to the party — a structure mirroring that of China’s military — have not been removed but simply given new job descriptions. Instead of ferreting out communist sympathisers, they now provide counselling to service members.

That cautious approach has come at a cost.

The US, which has a commitment to help Taiwan defend itself, has long pushed Taipei to reallocate its limited defence spending to more effectively deter a potential Chinese invasion and restructure its poorly trained reserve force. But implementation of reforms has been painfully gradual.

Tsai’s Democratic Progressive party, which pushed the KMT out of power for the first time in 2000, attributes this to the military’s legacy.

“There are many officers, especially above the rank of colonel, who blame the US for the increasing military tensions around here and agree with the argument that China is just responding to US provocations,” said a senior government official. “It contrasts with the younger ones, who fully identify with Taiwan, have high levels of morale and are determined to stand firm against China.”

Analysts said it was a miracle that no military coup had disrupted Taiwan’s transformation into a vibrant democracy.

After Chen Shui-bian, the first DPP president, was elected in 2000, “there was this tense feeling in the air: would the military follow orders from a DPP president? Would there be a coup, even?” Karalekas said. Chen placated the military and reassured the KMT by choosing a retired general and KMT member as his first premier. Today, there is no doubt that the armed forces are loyal to the constitution rather than their former party masters.

But other changes have taken longer. Until 2000, high-ranking officers were almost all men who were born either in mainland China or whose families had come from there with the KMT in 1949. “You had a situation where your ground troops were almost entirely Taiwanese, and they were led by mainlander officers,” Karalekas said.

Chen accelerated officer corps turnover by holding promotions every six months instead of annually. He expedited the staffing of flag officer positions with Taiwanese candidates, and by the end of his first term in 2004, three-quarters of the country’s flag officers had changed.

A push for more aggressive change

But experts caution that bureaucratic inertia could continue without radical reforms. Taiwan has cut its active-service military personnel by more than half since the 1990s to just 170,000, limiting junior officers’ chances for promotion. This made patronage networks even more important and discouraged individual initiative.

Moreover, when Taiwan emerged from decades of authoritarian rule, it focused on developing civil society and exploring the separate identity suppressed under the Kuomintang regime. That led attention and public spending away from the military.

“We don’t have enough civilian talent who understand the military,” Liao said. “In the US, we have entire think-tanks that study military affairs, and people who go between think-tanks, government and the military. But in Taiwan, we just have a few positions in universities here and there.”

Russia’s assault on Ukraine, which made Taiwanese society much more attuned to the risk of war, may provide an incentive to revitalise civil-military connections. It has boosted civil defence initiatives.

Last week, tycoon Robert Tsao pledged NT$1bn (US$33mn) to help finance two initiatives for training civilian fighters. But such plans will wither unless the military agrees to integrate them into its strategy, experts said.

“Some of the most heroic images coming out of the [Ukraine] war — the very images that have secured massive support from overseas — are of civilians fighting the Russian invaders,” Karalekas said. “If Taiwan is to secure this same level of international support in the event of a Chinese attack, then the civilians can’t be seen just waiting to be saved by their military, or worse yet, by someone else’s.”

“The military structures were put in place back when the KMT was essentially an occupying force, and there was the real risk of an uprising,” he added. “But today, Taiwan’s young people are proud of the society they’ve inherited and are willing to fight to protect their government and institutions. They must be given every opportunity to do so.”