Taiwan Commences Largest Military Drills in Response to Chinese Threats of Invasion
On 9 July, Taiwan commenced its annual live-fire military drills. The Republic of China (ROC) Armed Forces’ Han Kuang 41 Exercise is the largest military exercise seen in Taiwan, with 22,000 reservists called up alongside active service units, operating for a continuous 10-day period.
The exercise comes in the face of Chinese threats of invasion, and is intended to defend against China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) grey-zone provocations.
Chinese grey-zone provocations have escalated in recent months, with the PLA conducting drills daily around Taiwan, with PLA aircraft and naval vessels entering Taiwanese airspace and the Taiwan Strait respectively.
The exercise is designed to prepare Taiwan’s transition from peacetime into a wartime posture by building combat readiness in all branches of the ROC Armed Forces. Unscripted simulations will run imitating PLA in-transit amphibious landing units, with Taiwan’s military focusing on long-range naval precision strikes and maintaining air superiority.
Further drills will run simulating a PLA landing operation, and continued advancement inland with Taiwan to conduct littoral strikes, anti-air assault operations, urban-rural area defence, and further multi-level, in-depth defence deployments. These efforts are designed to build resilience in Taiwan’s military and overall resilience against a potential invasion, according to the ROC Ministry of National Defence.
The ROC Ministry of National Defence released a statement warning of the possibility of “some inconvenience to the public’s daily life and traffic”, and has asked for support from the public for the duration of the exercise.
These drills come as new equipment and weaponry have been recently commissioned by the ROC Armed Forces, such as its first HIMARS Rocket Artillery Unit. The ROC Ministry of National Defence recently released a special budget which plans to allocate NTD 115.1 to enhance military-civilian ICT architecture, alongside upgrading and increasing reserves of support equipment and provisions, aimed at enhancing operational sustainability and countering PLA grey-zone provocations.
(via @MoNDefense, X)
In response to the commencement of the Han Kuang 41 Exercise, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) added eight Taiwanese companies linked to Taiwan’s military to its Export Restricted Namelist, citing national security issues ‘due to their deliberate support for the “Taiwan independence” separatist forces’.
Despite most Taiwanese being in support of full or de facto independence, China has long claimed Taiwan as its own territory and has not ruled out the use of force to annex the island.