The Washington Post , The officials acknowledge that the program is a major departure from long-standing U.S. policy limiting military relations with Taiwan to avoid a confrontation with China. They describe it as a crash course intended to help Taiwan keep up with China's rapid military modernization and, importantly, avoid being bullied by Beijing if bilateral talks resume.
It is aimed at providing more advanced weapons to Taiwan's military and improving command and control, strategy and force planning, communications and the ability of the island's army, navy and air force to conduct joint operations.
U.S. military representatives, once almost completely banned from visiting Taiwan, are currently involved in dozens of programs on the island, including both classroom seminars and training in the field. U.S. officers are advising Taiwan's military at all levels in policy, implementation and training, U.S. and Taiwanese officials said. In addition, the two militaries have established a hotline for communicating in case of an emergency, a U.S. official and a senior Taiwanese diplomat said. Meanwhile, hundreds of Taiwanese military personnel are now undergoing training and education in the United States, U.S. officials said.
The sharp expansion of military ties risks angering China, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory. “China will not tolerate a de facto alliance,” said a senior Chinese official, speaking on condition of anonymity. China's defense minister, Gen. Cao Gangchuan, is in Washington for talks that will focus in part on Taiwan.
But many officials acknowledged that the program has thus far done little to improve Taiwan's ability to defend itself. “The United States has put a lot effort into this project, but there's really no improvement,” said retired Adm. Nelson Ku, the former commander of Taiwan's navy and now a member of Taiwan's congress.
U.S. officials said many Taiwanese officials, including President Chen Shui-bian, are reluctant to lock horns with the powerful military to push the reforms; others have not acknowledged that Taiwan needs to improve its war-fighting capabilities. Taiwanese government officials and legislators acknowledged the pace of change was glacial.
“It's like the end of the Qing dynasty when the emperors bought fancy weapons but there was no change in thinking,” said Shuai Hua-min, a former army two-star general and one of the main advocates of military reforms here. “They don't care whether the weapons systems are useful or not. It's become purely political to show China how close Taiwan is to the United States.”
China has vowed to attack Taiwan if it declares independence. The United States is required by law to provide for Taiwan's defense, but for most of the 1980s and '90s, U.S. military relations with Taiwan were limited to arms sales and a few training programs to support those sales. Following the normalization of ties with China in 1979, the United States banned most uniformed personnel from visiting the island and kept Taiwan's military at arm's length.
The expansion of military ties with Taiwan began during the Clinton administration after the 1996 crisis in which China fired missiles into waters off Taiwan. The Pentagon has pushed the relationship to a new level over the past three years because of a growing belief that the Chinese are attempting to develop the capability to undertake a rapid, intense strike against Taiwan to foment mass confusion on the island and decapitate the government before any significant U.S. forces can arrive, U.S. officials and experts said.
The Pentagon has conducted about a dozen assessments, reviews and studies of Taiwanese military capabilities in the past three years, U.S. officials said, including in-depth looks at Taiwan's ability to defend itself against air attacks, naval blockades and military landings as well as its command and control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems. One Pentagon report predicts that the balance of power in the Strait will shift in China's favor by 2005 if Taiwan does not embrace military modernization.
At the Bush administration's request, Congress passed legislation last year that would allow it to assign active-duty military personnel to the American Institute in Taiwan, the de facto U.S. embassy on the island.
Over the past three years, U.S. officers have begun attending Taiwanese military exercises as observers and Taiwanese officers have begun observing American military maneuvers. Hundreds of Taiwanese military personnel receive training at U.S. military colleges, academies and bases every year. While senior U.S. military officials are still barred from visiting Taiwan, high-level visits of Taiwanese military officials to the United States have become almost routine, U.S. officials said.
In theory, Taiwan should have a formidable defense. The island boasts small, narrow and shallow beaches that make amphibious landings difficult and only two natural harbors, in the north and the south, which could be easily fortified. The weather would also complicate any invasion attempt, with typhoons from May to September and rough seas in the 100-mile Taiwan Strait in the winter.
But U.S. military officers say Taiwan needs to remake its armed forces to keep up with China, which has purchased new weapons from Russia, improved the ability of its army, navy and air force to work together and positioned hundreds of missiles across from Taiwan. U.S. officials have urged the Taiwanese military to simplify its command structure, demobilize thousands of officers, radically shrink the size of its army from 240,000 men and pour the bulk of its resources into its navy and air force, the services most important to countering a Chinese attack.
Taiwan's Defense Ministry has launched a plan to cut troop strength but experts say the changes are too small and too slow. And Taiwan's army has blocked for now a government plan to overhaul the military's command structure by putting the army, air force and naval commands under the control of the joint chiefs, Taiwanese officials said. In addition, Taiwan remains divided into five regional commands and a sixth offshore command, far too complicated for an island only slightly larger than Maryland. The military also remains top-heavy, with almost four times the U.S. ratio of officers to soldiers.
U.S. officials have worked with the Taiwanese on their ability to survive a first strike from China, including one that wipes out senior political and military leaders. But a program to harden the island's command bunkers has stalled. The program has not succeeded in finishing even one facility — the Hengshan Command Center in Taipei, the capital — because of allegations of corruption involving the Taiwanese contractor, sources in Taiwan said.
Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, “is seven minutes away from elimination, and he faces that threat every day,” said one U.S. official.
U.S. efforts to encourage joint warfare — cooperation among Taiwan's army, navy and air force — have run into unexpected political problems. Chen's government wants to merge the three services' command colleges into one academy, arguing that is the best way to promote joint operations. But his opponents fear the move masks a plot to destroy the traditions of such institutions as the army's Whampoa Military Academy, founded in 1924 on mainland China. Those traditions have taught Taiwan's officers for decades that Taiwan is part of China and that reunification is ultimately a good idea. Chen has rejected those traditions and is moving Taiwan toward independence.
“The American officers have walked into a political minefield,” said Shuai. “Their ideas might make sense militarily but placed within Taiwan's context they are easily manipulated.”
A U.S. program to help Taiwan acquire better weapons has also run into difficulties. More than two years after the Bush administration approved a $20 billion to $30 billion arms package for sale to Taiwan, only a few weapons have been ordered and none have been delivered, U.S. officials said. One problem is Taiwan's defense budget, which has been shrinking as a share of total government spending. This year's $7.5 billion budget accounts for about 2.6 percent of the island's gross domestic product and 16 percent of total spending, compared with 4 percent of GDP and 24 percent of total spending a decade earlier.
The procurement process has also been complicated by Taiwan's increasingly assertive legislature, which is locked in a stalemate between Chen's ruling Democratic Progressive Party and the opposition Nationalist and People First parties. Many legislators believe that U.S. business interests drive U.S. policy regarding weapons sales, resulting in inflated prices or efforts to dump obsolete weapons on Taiwan. Chen recently proposed a special $15 billion allocation to buy U.S. weapons but it has no hope of being approved until next year at the earliest.
Another problem, Taiwanese officials say, is that the United States occasionally proposes weapons sales or ambitious reforms without a road map for carrying them out. The most prominent part of a multibillion-dollar package of weapons proposed by the Bush administration in April 2001, for example, was eight diesel submarines. Bush authorized the sale even though the United States no longer manufactures diesel submarines, which means U.S. contractors would need to purchase the designs from European manufacturers or develop a new one specifically for Taiwan.
China's opposition to such a sale would be “extremely serious,” the senior Chinese official said. The Netherlands was the last country that sold Taiwan a submarine and China almost severed relations with The Hague. A U.S. team, led by Gibson Leboeuf, the U.S. Navy's point man on the submarine deal, arrived in Taipei recently to focus on the submarine deal.
Among other items, Taiwan has also balked at the price tag of $4.1 billion for the 12 P-3C Orion anti-submarine aircraft approved for sale by the Bush administration.
The slow pace of arms sales has led some U.S. officials to question Taiwan's commitment to its self-defense. U.S. officials have told the Taiwanese that President Bush's statement in April 2001 that the United States would do “whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself” did not mean Taiwan could stop upgrading its military and depend entirely on U.S. forces. In a speech before Taiwanese officials in February, Richard Lawless, a deputy assistant defense secretary, said Taiwan “should not view America's resolute commitment to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait as a substitute for investing the necessary resources in its own defense.”
Some Taiwanese officials warn that too much American pressure risks a backlash from Taiwan — with potentially serious ramifications for relations with China. Some Taiwanese military officers and officials now say that Taiwan cannot keep up with China's military buildup by purchasing defensive systems so it should develop an attack capability to deter China. Taiwan had a medium-range missile program that was scuttled, along with an earlier secret nuclear weapons program, after pressure from Washington.
“We need something to threaten China with, to make them think twice about attacking us,” said Lee Wen-chung, a legislator from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party who sits on the armed services committee. “If the United States doesn't give us the red light, I think we should go forward.”
