Grim Taiwan military report (General)

by dan, Friday, September 03, 2021, 15:56 (938 days ago) @ dulan drift

Well, shit. A couple excerpts that stand out for me are:

This year's report said that China can launch what it termed "soft and hard electronic attacks", including blocking communications across the western part of the first island chain, the string of islands that run from the Japanese archipelago, through Taiwan and down to the Philippines.

China "can combine with its internet army to launch wired and wireless attacks against the global internet, which would initially paralyse our air defences, command of the sea and counter-attack system abilities, presenting a huge threat to us".

I wonder what the hard electronic attacks would be. There are undersea cables that supply Taiwan's Internet. They run south of the island. An earthquake in... 2006? severed those lines after the Taiwan split and it partially knocked out the Internet to Hong Kong for weeks. Since then I imagine much traffic has gone satellite, but most is still almost certainly cable.

Or are they talking about disabling stations? Interesting.

Chinese spies in Taiwan could launch a "decapitation strike" to destroy political and economic infrastructure, it added.

There must be literally thousands of Chinese spies in Taiwan, not counting KMT sympathizers.

Regarding KMT sympathizers, I think one of my posts we lost in the recent meltdown was regarding the historic KMT/military relationship, and resulting pro-China leaning of the Taiwan military. I mentioned this in that lost (I think) posting, so apologies for any redundancy, but...

When I taught English at a military academy in Taiwan, I once heard the class leader announce to the class (all officers) that if Taiwan declared independence, he would fight for China. Wow, I thought to myself. I knew then (and this was 30 years ago... guess I should have mentioned that).. I knew then that this was the military's stance, so it did not surprise me that any officers would feel this way, but to announce it publicly on a base did surprise me a bit, given the changes that were happening at the time.

I suspect things have changed a lot since then, but there's still that old guard who still view China as theirs, or at least home. It's an extremely complicated situation.

The question is, to what extent will Taiwan's military actually defend Taiwan? What is the current mindset of the military?


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