Taiwan leader at helm of anti-invasion drills
President takes to warship for largest military exercise as US suggests Beijing will strike within 18 months
TAIWAN’S president boarded a warship yesterday to watch the country’s largest ever military drills amid warnings that China could move to invade Taiwan within a year and a half.
Tsai Ing-wen, dressed in combat fatigues, oversaw her armed forces’ simulated efforts to push back an invading force, which included air-raid exercises across the island of 24million people.
“Let’s continue to guard our homeland together. Good job,” she said from aboard a decommissioned US Kiddclass missile destroyer. It was only her second time on a navy ship in her six years in office.
Twenty warships including frigates and destroyers fired shells to intercept a would-be invasion off Taiwan’s northeast coast, while fleets of F-16 fighter jets and domestically manufactured Ching-kuo fighters launched air strikes.
Island-wide drills this year include repulsion of an invading force at a harbour near the capital Taipei, urban combat practice by the reservist force, and an exercise to transfer jets across Taiwan to bunkers dug out of the side of mountains on the remote east coast to withstand a first wave of missile attacks.
It comes amid White House fears that Beijing could strike the island nation earlier than first thought.
The New York Times reported yesterday that officials in Washington were increasingly concerned Beijing was learning lessons from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and may try to accelerate its strategy to seize Taiwan within 18 months, perhaps by cutting off access to all or part of the Taiwan Strait or seizing an outlying island.
“One school of thought is that the lesson is ‘go early and go strong’ before there is time to strengthen Taiwan’s defences,” said Chris Coons, a Delaware senator known to be close to President Joe Biden.
The US and China are facing off over multiple potential flashpoints in the Indo-pacific region, including Taiwan, which the Chinese Communist Party maintains is its own territory even though it has never ruled there.
US fighter jets staged a rare large show of force late last month above an area in the East China Sea that is disputed between Japan and China, causing the Chinese to scramble their own military aircraft in response, the Japanese media reported on Monday.
The reports, citing government sources, said the US warplanes neared the Chinese mainland to exert pressure on Beijing over its stance on Taiwan, and to test China’s response.
On Monday, the Chinese foreign ministry repeated its warnings that it would “act strongly to resolutely respond” with countermeasures if a potential trip by Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, to Taipei went ahead next month. Ms Pelosi has not confirmed the visit. Last week, Bill Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, played down speculation that Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, could attempt to take Taiwan after a key Communist party meeting later this year, where he intends to be installed for a third term as leader.
“The risks of that become higher, it seems to us, the further into this decade that you get,” Mr Burns told the Aspen Security Forum.
Previous US predictions, including one by Adml Philip Davidson, the former head of Indo-pacific command, have focused on a timescale of five to six years.
Both Taipei and Washington, its biggest arms supplier, are also drawing lessons from the Ukraine war to sharpen their focus on building Taiwan’s defences with “asymmetric” warfare capabilities – small, mobile and survivable weapons that could inflict maximum damage on an invading force.