Basic Secretary Xi Jinping clearly desires to arrange China for a conflict over Taiwan. The measures he’s taking to prepared its folks, economic system, authorized system, and particularly its navy are clear for everybody to see. The greatest technique to dissuade him from truly rolling the iron cube is for Washington and Taipei to work collectively, as a result of neither can cease Beijing on their very own. It might be a idiot’s errand for Taiwan to withstand a Chinese language navy onslaught with out its chief patron and protector. And the US wants Taiwan to maintain on and maintain out lengthy sufficient for the U.S. navy to reach in decisive power.
Sadly, that is simpler stated than completed. Many Taiwanese residents query whether or not America will truly defend them. Washington’s lengthy standing posture of strategic ambiguity is clearly one supply of skepticism. However even strategic readability towards Taipei is not going to clear up the issue. The very fact is that Washington and Taipei have a lengthy and complex relationship. Taiwanese voters know the US has a lengthy historical past of turning its again on them of their second of want.
Thus, there isn’t a query that the US ought to take steps to deal with Taiwan’s comprehensible lack of religion in America’s dedication. A wise first step is to deal with the backlog in arms deliveries to Taiwan, as two Kuomintang legislative staffers just lately argued in these pages. And there are a number of different issues Washington can do to show that it’s critical about Taiwan.
However growing Taiwanese religion in American credibility is just a part of the answer. The Taiwanese folks should additionally consider that they’ve what it takes to resist a Chinese language onslaught. Neither quicker arms deliveries nor greater protection spending will instill this a lot wanted self-confidence.
So, what is going to? Remodeling the tradition of the Taiwanese armed forces, particularly its officer corps. As a former marine who educated Taiwanese items and a retired Taiwanese naval officer educated in the US, we understood all too nicely that Taiwan’s navy stays a profoundly unserious group. It’s not able to wage conflict. And the Taiwanese folks understand it.
Subsequently, any effort to reinforce cross-Strait deterrence should begin with the tradition of its officer corps. Taiwan wants uniformed leaders who’re keen to deal with exhausting truths, embrace innovation, and place strategic considering above parochial curiosity, legacy techniques, and bureaucratic comfort. To get from right here to there, Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te must trim the bloated ranks of his normal and flag officer corps and demand that the navy lastly produce a coherent blueprint for mounting a real, uneven, whole-of-society protection of Taiwan. The Lai administration ought to insist on — and the Kuomintang-dominated Legislative Yuan might want to help — the creation of institutional mechanisms to reinforce civilian management over the navy. Washington can and may assist by addressing the arms backlog, if solely to forestall Taiwan’s Ministry of Nationwide Protection from utilizing it as an excuse; firming down public calls for for dramatically greater protection spending; making it clear that different types of help are conditional on efforts to deal with these cultural issues; and serving to the Lai administration develop a coherent blueprint for uneven protection.
A Potemkin Pressure
Taiwan’s navy is grappling with a variety of persistent issues, most of that are simple to identify by anybody (in Washington, Taipei … and Beijing) who’ve bothered wanting. Probably the most pernicious challenges is that Taiwan’s navy doesn’t have sufficient folks. Its military — the biggest of Taiwan’s armed forces and its final line of protection in a conflict — suffers from an endemic personnel scarcity. Shortfalls are notably acute in frontline infantry, armor, artillery, and marine fight items, which are sometimes as much as 40 % understrength. This isn’t merely a recruiting concern. It reveals a basic misalignment in how the navy organizes and prioritizes its sources. The discrepancy between fight unit manning ranges and complete personnel ranges, which hover round 80 %, is telling in that it underscores the diploma to which Taiwan’s navy prioritizes administrative staffing over operational readiness. For years, the Tsai administration (2016 to 2024) tried to deal with the issue by enhancing pay and advantages for the volunteer power. When that effort proved too costly, President Tsai Ing-wen lastly relented and (re)prolonged conscription from 4 to 12 months. The military inducted the primary batch of 12-month conscripts in January 2024. Sadly, it’ll take no less than 5 years for this scheme to get absolutely up and working. Even then, the plan is to ship most one-year conscripts to items tasked with offering rear space safety. Volunteer troops will nonetheless comprise the majority of most frontline fight items, which implies the primary line of protection will stay understrength. Worse but, the military has but to determine find out how to prepare all of those conscripts, as we focus on under. It’s subsequently fully attainable that the scheme will merely “rework” untrained conscripts into undertrained ones.
Sarcastically, the one factor Taiwan has sufficient of are generals and admirals: 308 to be actual. The ratio of normal and flag officers to servicemembers is roughly 2.5 instances greater than that discovered within the U.S. navy (which is criticized by its personal secretary of protection for being too prime heavy.)
Even when the Ministry of Nationwide Protection magically solves its personnel shortfalls, it’ll nonetheless battle to coach the ensuing inflow of recent troops. A part of the issue has to do with infrastructure. It’ll take time (and cash) to purchase and construct barracks and firing ranges in a spot already quick on house. The larger concern is that the armed forces do not need a tradition of practical and rigorous coaching. Most workouts are scripted with preordained outcomes. Though political leaders now wish to tout spontaneous maneuvers, it comes throughout as a case of “the woman doth protest an excessive amount of.” As a substitute, most high-profile maneuvers stay extra “canine and pony present” for the media and American onlookers than a critical try to check and enhance warfighting capabilities. Having educated this manner for generations implies that Taiwan doesn’t have sufficient non-commissioned officers and junior officers who’re themselves sufficiently well-versed in decentralized trendy fight techniques, methods, and procedures to coach tens of hundreds of recent troops annually.
The checklist goes on: The providers nonetheless lack a coherent, overarching doctrine and related operational ideas to information every little thing from procurement to coaching to warfighting (and no, the latest Quadrennial Protection Evaluation doesn’t fill this hole). Reserve coaching is nonetheless insufficient. And regardless of efforts by the Lai administration and civil society organizations like Ahead Alliance and Spirit of America, makes an attempt to arrange Taiwanese society for conflict stay incomplete. In fact, a giant obstacle to civil readiness is the truth that the Ministry of Nationwide Protection refuses to embrace civil protection as a core mission.
Worst of all, there’s a profound hole between the Taiwanese navy and the society it’s sworn to defend. Many older Taiwanese — particularly these aligned with Lai’s Democratic Progressive Celebration — view the navy with suspicion as a result of many officers determine with the opposition Kuomintang Celebration and due to the navy’s legacy because the enforcement arm of Chiang Kai-shek’s authoritarian regime. In the meantime, one want solely strike up a dialog with youthful Taiwanese to seek out that many take into account navy service a waste of time. That is partly as a result of they know the way unserious their coaching will likely be, even at 12 months, and partly as a result of they rationally choose to pursue the next paying job that can enable them to maneuver out of their mother and father’ residence.
A Dereliction of Obligation
How did the rot get so unhealthy? Culpability rests squarely on the shoulders of Taiwan’s officer corps. It goes with out saying that officers lead the navy and are subsequently chargeable for every little thing that occurs — or fails to occur — on their watch. However on this case, the failures symbolize a basic dereliction of responsibility. It was the officer corps’ accountability to trace the shifting cross-Strait navy stability and to regulate its posture and preparations accordingly. This fundamental mandate demanded vigilance, proactivity, creativity, curiosity, and adaptability. The Taiwanese officer corps demonstrated none of these items. Because of this, it’s simply now coming to grips with a variety of profound, however gradual transferring, political, technological, and demographic tendencies.
Take, for instance, the best way Taiwanese generals and admirals “responded” to Taiwan’s declining birthrate. Whereas they now routinely level to this concern because the root trigger of their personnel shortages, they’ve been conscious of this development for greater than 20 years. But regardless of having ample time to adapt, the officer corps acquiesced to politically engaging selections — such because the transition to an all-volunteer power and the shortening of conscription — with out bothering to develop and supply a critical various plan for sustaining readiness. Much more troubling, the officer corps managed a dramatic downsizing of the power with out making any significant try to additionally streamline its inside organizational construction. Taiwan’s navy now has roughly the identical variety of command layers supervising 160,000 uniformed servicemembers because it did when it was half one million sturdy.
The identical goes for Taiwanese doctrine, power construction, and power posture. As a substitute of responding to overwhelming proof that Chinese language navy modernization had rendered their long-standing choice for small numbers of pricy, standard, and high-profile American made ships and jets by in search of change, Taiwan’s officer corps insisted on extra of the identical. Even now, senior officers inside the Ministry of Nationwide Protection proceed to push for extra fixed-wing fighters, amphibious assault ships, and dear and unsure indigenous submarines. In the meantime, they sideline extra survivable alternate options like cellular missile techniques, small and quick boats working from civilian harbors, and territorial protection.
The Roots of Dysfunction
To treatment an an infection, a health care provider should first discover its supply. Equally, if Washington and Taipei are critical about making ready Taiwan’s navy for conflict, they should determine and take care of the underlying reason for its dysfunction. We consider that all of it begins with organizational tradition.
The scholarly literature on navy change and effectiveness is obvious on this level: tradition issues. A wholesome navy tradition — one able to adapting in peacetime and in wartime — cultivates flexibility, curiosity, and sincere inside debate. Subordinates should really feel empowered to problem assumptions. Senior leaders should worth — or no less than not punish — dissent and suggestions whereas additionally remaining delicate to top-down, political enter.
Taiwan’s navy tradition reveals just about none of those attributes. It’s inflexible, hierarchical, risk-averse, and allergic to exterior affect. Maybe essentially the most telling symptom of this dysfunction is the rising variety of retired generals who now seem on tv to diagnose systemic flaws — issues they made no effort to repair once they held the facility to take action. This sample displays a deeper cultural malaise: one in every of deflection, inertia, and institutional self-preservation.
Like all cultures, this one is the product of a fancy interaction of things. Three are price analyzing intimately: an identification constructed round a navy academy and ethos modeled after the Soviet navy; enduring isolation from the remainder of Taiwanese society; and, after 1979, an absence of publicity to accomplice militaries.
Whampoa-Centric Institutional Identification
To know how the Taiwanese officer corps understands and defines itself, one should begin with the Whampoa Army Academy. Established in China in 1924, the Nationalists modeled the Whampoa Army Academy after the Soviet Pink Military (Moscow even despatched one in every of its personal, Pavel Pavlov, to function the academy’s first chief advisor).
Almost a century later, Whampoa’s cultural genetic materials persists all through Taiwan’s navy establishments such that Taiwanese navy tradition additionally stays deeply Whampoa-centric. To bolster this shared identification, each cadet from each service academy should attend boot camp at Whampoa (renamed the Republic of China Army Academy after it relocated to Kaohsiung). Yearly, the service academies additionally take part within the Pu Guang Yan Xi (“Glory of Whampoa Train”) to commemorate the academy’s anniversary. Final 12 months, Lai even joined in on the festivities. This symbolic centralization reinforces the dominance of army-centric values and considering, typically to the detriment of joint power improvement and innovation. This “cult of the Whampoa” has come at a excessive worth for Taiwan’s navy by reinforcing norms and values that privilege patronage over competence, political connections over benefit, and loyalty above all else.
Home Isolation and Cultural Entrenchment
Internally, the navy’s aforementioned cultural isolation from Taiwanese society has deepened its resistance to reform. For generations, navy service has carried a detrimental social stigma, encapsulated by the outdated saying: “Good males don’t turn out to be troopers; good iron doesn’t turn out to be nails.” Almost 4 many years of martial regulation solely served to bolster this alienation on condition that Chiang and his son used the navy as a instrument of political repression and authoritarian management.
Underneath the Kuomintang’s one-party rule, Chiang indoctrinated the navy within the thought of the “trinity of enemies”: Chinese language Communists, Taiwanese independence supporters, and home conspirators. In fact, these latter two teams finally advanced into the Democratic Progressive Celebration, which rose to political energy via the democratic course of. Nevertheless official the Democratic Progressive Celebration could have been within the eyes of Taiwanese voters, its place atop the federal government created a deep sense of cognitive dissonance inside the officer corps, as a result of their historic “enemies” have been now in cost.
Past orienting Taiwan’s senior uniformed generals and admirals in opposition to their Democratic Progressive Celebration leaders, cultural isolation had one other insidious impact: it allowed the officer corps to protect outdated traditions from the Chiang period. Officers who suppose in a different way or problem the “established order” are sometimes marginalized, if not compelled out altogether. This sense of being disrespected and misunderstood by broader society has solely entrenched the officer corps additional right into a defensive, inward-looking posture that resists exterior scrutiny and reform.
Worldwide Isolation and Stagnation
Nor can we ignore the function that worldwide isolation performed by way of shielding the officer corps from the stress to embrace cultural change. Earlier than the US severed formal diplomatic ties with the Republic of China, U.S. navy personnel within the Taiwan Protection Command offered priceless interplay and coaching alternatives. Sadly, these exchanges had minimal cultural influence on condition that they occurred below the shadow of authoritarian rule and largely didn’t problem entrenched norms.
After 1979, worldwide navy exchanges just about ceased in a single day. Except for occasional (and purely transactional) arms gross sales, Taiwanese officers have been lower off from their overseas friends. It was not till the Third Taiwan Strait Disaster within the late Nineteen Nineties that the US started to reassess the readiness of each its personal forces and people of Taiwan. Key U.S. officers resembling Kurt Campbell and Randy Schriver launched renewed efforts to reengage Taiwan via navy coaching and advisory applications within the late Nineteen Nineties and early 2000s. Nonetheless, the 20 years of isolation previous to that had already solidified a conservative, insular management tradition.
At present’s senior navy leaders got here of age throughout these misplaced many years. In a Confucian society the place seniority is usually equated with knowledge (the upper the rank, the higher the presumed information), difficult authority just isn’t solely discouraged however typically seen as insubordination. The notion {that a} junior officer — or worse, an outsider — might need a greater thought is inconceivable to many inside the higher ranks. This cultural rigidity continues to impede the adoption of progressive techniques, uneven methods, and reforms mandatory for contemporary warfare.
To Change an Military
This tradition has confirmed remarkably resilient and resistant to alter. It stays steeped in custom, constrained by hierarchy, and guarded in opposition to exterior affect and persists even within the face of renewed U.S.-Taiwanese military-to-military safety cooperation. The cruel actuality is that even in 2025, Taiwan’s navy nonetheless has extra in widespread with a Soviet mannequin than it does trendy, Western armed forces.
Cultural change is tough. Fortunately, it can and does occur. However Taipei and Washington mustn’t wait round for Taiwan’s navy to alter itself. Listed below are 3 ways the Lai and Trump administrations can start to deal with a few of these challenges.
First, Lai must articulate a transparent imaginative and prescient for the way he expects his officer corps to function. Earlier than doing so, he and his prime advisors might want to immerse themselves within the particulars of recent warfare and the nuances of the Taiwanese navy paperwork — matters Taiwanese politicians in each events have lengthy been far too blissful to elide. Though students of navy reform disagree about quite a lot of issues, there’s a clear consensus that adaptive navy organizations ought to possess a tradition that nurtures innovation, initiative, and introspection. Senior officers have to actively encourage questioning, tolerate dissent, empower subordinates, and embrace classes from historical past and practical coaching workouts. And so they should show the humility to think about new approaches and to ask and reward enter from under.
Second, Lai ought to cull the herd of Taiwanese normal and flag officers. The largest supply of resistance to alter has lengthy emanated from the senior-most ranks. In any case, there are just too many generals and admirals. With practically one for each 500 troops, this top-heavy equipment naturally exacerbates a bloated and overly centralized command construction and deeply ingrained bureaucratic inertia. Lai ought to after all lower his normal and flag officer corps with a scalpel, not a broadsword, as a result of there are those that help reform.
As a substitute, Lai might want to act with precision, sending generals and admirals who’re clearly “retired on energetic responsibility” in addition to those that actively subvert uneven protection transformation (he is aware of who they’re), out to pasture. As a substitute of changing them with the subsequent highest-ranking officer in line, Lai needs to be keen to determine and promote pro-reform leaders to the highest echelons of command, no matter their present rank.
To supervise implementation, Lai and the Legislative Yuan might want to work collectively to create institutional mechanisms to assist future presidents extra successfully monitor and steer the navy. Although President Lai took the necessary step of placing a profession civilian in command of the navy, Minister Wellington Koo nonetheless lacks an institutional equal to the Workplace of the Secretary of Protection via which he can successfully monitor the Ministry of Nationwide Protection. Civilian oversight suffers consequently.
Third, whereas the US has a horrible monitor file of facilitating cultural change in accomplice militaries, there are nonetheless methods it may help from the sidelines. For instance, Washington ought to make it clear that cultural change of the type we name for on this article must precede different reform efforts lest they fail to take root. The US ought to, after all, take affordable steps to scale back the present arms gross sales backlog, if solely to preempt the Ministry of Nationwide Protection’s “go to” excuse that late deliveries are stopping it from doing its job.
Past that, Washington ought to put new arms gross sales on the backburner whereas downplaying requires Taiwan to dramatically improve its protection spending. We acknowledge that pushing Taipei to spend extra on protection performs nicely in Washington and that spending is necessary. Nevertheless it bears repeating: All of the arms and all the cash on the earth can not clear up a essentially cultural drawback. Even military-to-military coaching is unlikely to work absent a deeper, cultural reform. Generations of tactical and operational reform makes an attempt by overseas advisors — starting from Joseph Stilwell to U.S. Army Help Advisory Group officers and right this moment’s U.S. Military and Marine Corps trainers — have repeatedly didn’t take root, largely as a result of the tradition itself has not been conducive to alter.
Worse but, and not using a change in tradition, extra arms and extra spending may truly backfire. Many Taiwanese already take into account U.S. arms gross sales as a corrupt type of safety cash. Because of this, the extra weapons the US sells to Taiwan, the much less incentive the Taiwanese folks have to supply for their very own protection, as a result of they assume the US will now be “on the hook” to defend them. It ought to go with out saying that pouring more cash into an inefficient and dysfunctional system is a blueprint for waste that can solely serve to additional alienate Taiwanese taxpayers from their guardians.
Washington also can assist pro-change civilians and officers put together a transparent roadmap for reform. Protection transformation is a fancy endeavor that essentially includes numerous authorities companies, personal corporations, and nongovernmental organizations. An overarching blueprint, with agreed-upon milestones, will assist either side orchestrate their efforts. It’ll enable Washington to measure progress and tailor its help, whereas giving Taiwanese civilian officers a instrument for sustaining oversight. The one most necessary milestone on this plan — one on which the subsequent administration ought to insist — is the dissemination of a navy doctrine for defending Taiwan asymmetrically. Taiwan’s armed forces haven’t had such an overarching uneven plan to coordinate operations, coaching, and acquisitions since rejecting Adm. Lee Hsi-min’s Total Protection Idea.
The scenario is dire, not hopeless. Absent a basic shift in navy tradition, even the very best methods, budgets, and applied sciences could fail to translate into actual readiness. As Taiwan faces an more and more assertive and succesful adversary throughout the Strait, time is working quick to shut this cultural hole.
Yuster Yu is the senior govt advisor of Octon Worldwide and a senior advisor of the iScann Group. A retired Taiwanese naval officer, he served on Taiwan’s Nationwide Safety Council and as a naval attaché to the US. He’s a graduate of the Virginia Army Institute, the U.S. Pacific Fleet Anti-Submarine Warfare Officer Course, and Johns Hopkins Faculty of Superior Worldwide Research.
Michael A. Hunzeker (@MichaelHunzeker) is an affiliate professor at George Mason College’s Schar Faculty of Coverage and Authorities, the place he additionally directs the Taiwan Safety Monitor. He served within the Marine Corps from 2000 to 2006.
Picture: Taiwan Presidential Workplace by way of Wikimedia Commons
