The difference between Taiwan's military educational system and its civilian counterpart is shrinking, and in some respects the armed forces have the edge when it comes to inculcating young people with "the right stuff." How do Taiwan's "military brats" fare in the twenty-first century?
"Good iron should not be made into nails, and good men should not be made into soldiers"--so goes the Chinese saying. "The people shall have the duty of performing military service in accordance with law"--so stipulates Article 20 of the ROC Constitution. As good Chinese, people put their trust in the wisdom of their ancestors. As good citizens, however, they must obey a law which obliges all males (but not females) to perform twenty-two months of military service.
Most of Taiwan's young men have their first contact with military education at an early age. Starting in senior or vocational high school, boys are required to take courses that provide a basic introduction to the country's armed forces and military schools. If they are lucky, they may also get to fire a few live rounds once a year. But since military topics do not figure in the all-important Joint University Entrance Examination, most students spend as little time as possible on them. Nowadays, school military instructors usually "remind" students of the subjects they would do well to memorize if they want to pass the internal midterm and final examinations. In summary, school military education is more a series of talks than a punishing program of walks.
Conscription, however, is a much more serious matter. Under the Military Service Law, "male persons shall be liable for military service on January 1 of the year immediately following the year during which they reach the age of eighteen." Senior -high, vocational-high, and college students whose studies would be interrupted by conscription can seek deferral until after graduation. But all men who pass the fitness examination must do their military service at some point in their careers.
Two hours of class each week are hardly likely to mature a callow youth into a properly trained soldier, which is why the first thing rookies must endure after conscription is a grueling nine-week intensive course, conducted at a training center. Each of the military's three branches runs its own centers, where the emphasis is on physical training and basic military skills, such as stripping and reassembling a rifle, and the "I say 'jump,' you say 'how high?'" stuff. After that, new soldiers are assigned to units where they receive further training in any specialized skills they need to do their work. Men who are posted to the anti-aircraft artillery, for example, need to familiarize themselves with weapons operation and maintenance, while those who go into the signal corps have a lot to learn about wired and wireless communications.
Conscripts can become noncommissioned officers (NCOs) after completing an additional three months of training. If they have a college degree they can also become officer candidates, as long as they have passed a special examination that is normally taken shortly before graduation. But whether they end up serving as officers, NCOs, or privates, twenty-two months is often too short a time in which to acquire today's specialized high-tech military skills. It may be more than a year before a conscript is of genuine use to his unit, and by then his mind will already be on life after soldiering. If Taiwan's defenses are to be maintained, it is thus necessary to recruit and train full-time career professionals who can spend as long as necessary on acquiring essential expertise.
At the same time, however, the emphasis is shifting from stressing offense and defense equally, and focusing instead on defense pure and simple. As part of that revised policy, for the past seven years the Ministry of National Defense (MND) has been implementing a troop restructuring plan that aims to reduce the numbers of active personnel from a figure approaching 500,000 to fewer than 400,000 by the year 2001. According to the ministry's Recruiting Center, the restructured armed forces will need an intake of about 17,000 volunteer officers and NCOs each year. In other words, it somehow has to persuade that number of youngsters between the ages of fifteen (some NCO schools enroll junior-high graduates into their senior-high programs) and twenty-four to sign up for boarding school.
The demand is manifest, but what about the supply? Gen. Yao Chiang, director of the MND's Recruiting Center, agrees that Taiwan's human resources market is extremely competitive. "The army wants good young people, but so does every other regular college or private enterprise," he says. "So this is like marketing a product. What we need to do is convince the customers with facts and comparisons, and sell our product to the target customer group."
But what exactly is the product? Since the establishment of the first military academy, the National Defense Medical Center (NDMC), in 1902, the ROC has built seventeen military educational institutions providing different programs to career officers, NCOs, and other specialized military personnel. Seven of them--the academies of the army, navy, and air force, Fu Hsing Kang College, NDMC, the National Defense Management College, and the Chung Cheng Institute of Technology (CCIT)--provide university and graduate-level programs. Others provide high-school-level programs or train specialist officers. Requirements differ according to the program, but basically students receive between two and a half and seven years of general education, get their bachelor's, junior-college, or high-school degrees, and then serve in the military for a minimum period that varies between four and fourteen years. After that, they can choose to sign on for longer terms.
Three years ago, some of the military colleges, such as NDMC and the National Defense Management College, began to enroll self-funded students who received exactly the same training and education as the government-funded intake. Such self -funded students can apply to become career officers. If their applications are successful, their tuition is refunded and they go on to serve for the prescribed minimum period. Alternatively, they may pay their own way through graduation, serve twenty -two months of compulsory military service as officer cadets, and then say good-bye to the armed forces.
Why would anyone want to sign on for a military education, given that it involves living away from home in a spartan--some would say, at least during the initial basic training period, harsh--environment? One answer lies in the lavish facilities, campuses, and general resources that military schools have at their disposal. Gen. Yao Chiang's appeal to his young "custom ers" at this level, however, is primarily directed to their parents' wallets. The MND estimates that the expense of a civilian university education (excluding medical colleges) varies between NT$560,000 and NT$750,000 (US$16,065-24,194), with NT$285,000 and NT$378,000 (US$9,194-12,194) being the corresponding figures for three years of senior or vocational high school. But military school students pay nothing. Not only that--they also receive free board, lodging, and clothing, plus about NT$13,000 (US$420) a month in allowances.
The pitch is capable of working remarkably well, as the career of Lee Chien-hung demonstrates. Lee, currently a senior at the CCIT's Department of Civil Engineering, comes from Pingtung in southern Taiwan, where his parents own a small factory that manufactures screws. In the Joint University Entrance Examination, Lee scored well enough to enter Yuan Ze University, a private institution in Taoyuan. At the same time, however, his brother was due to enter medical college, which was going to be extremely expensive. "I knew nothing about military educational institutions, and it had never crossed my mind to become a career officer," he confesses. "But if I'd chosen to go to that private university, the financial burden would have been extremely heavy for the family. I couldn't let it happen."
So Lee went to CCIT instead. There he quickly learned that free education and monthly allowances are only part of the advantageous economic package that goes with military education. For example, he does not have to worry about facing the stiff competition in Taiwan's overheated job market. "When I visited my high-school teachers, they told me that I was the only one in my class who already had a clear future," says Chiang Ai-yuan, a student at CCIT's Department of Weapon Systems Engineering. "My classmates, including some who are about to graduate from the island's top universities, are worrying about whether they should or can make it to graduate school, or if they should do their compulsory service now and spend twenty-two months fretting about what the job market is going to be like afterward."
The economic advantages do not stop there. Military school grads are not looking at just any old job, but steady employment with reasonable pay. According to an MND survey, the starting monthly salary for regular junior-college graduates ranges between NT$21,000 and NT$28,000 (US$677-903), whereas a second lieutenant who has completed the same level of military junior college (including six months of basic training) can make more than NT$35,000 (US$1,129). The starting salary for a career corporal is about NT$28,000 (US$903), also higher than the NT$19,000 to NT$25,000 (US$613-806) that recent high-school and vocational-high graduates earn on average. In addition, volunteer officers and NCOs are entitled to a discount on their water and electricity bills, they can apply for low-interest home loans, and they are exempt from paying income tax.
There are other attractions, however, and students enter military schools for a wide variety of reasons. The parents of Lin Chi-kang, for example, had wanted him to become a doctor since he was just a boy, so he ended up in NDMC. Chou Yi-ching was greatly influenced by his uncle, an alumnus of Fu Hsing Kang College, so he decided to follow in his footsteps when he was still a child. He is now a senior in the college's Department of Social Work. Such people were motivated by considerations of content and quality, rather than purely economic factors.
The content of any military program falls into two parts: regular education and military education. The first part, which is required by the Ministry of Education, is the same as students obtain at regular universities, junior colleges, or high schools, although there can sometimes be differences in teaching techniques. A civilian school, for instance, might use two moving cars to illustrate a time-and-distance problem involving relative speeds, while a military school would show students how a bomb hits a moving tank.
The second part, military education in its pure sense, is required by the Ministry of National Defense. All students initially receive nine weeks of basic military training. This is extremely demanding physically, and some students fall by the wayside. "Half of me wanted to quit, but the other half said, why couldn't I hang in there when other people could," Lee Chien-hung says. "We see those nine weeks of training as necessary to turn us into military students. We call trainees 'cock roaches.' They only become men once they've completed the training."
Each school has devised different programs to meet its own special requirements. Fu Hsing Kang College, for example, is more generally known from its Chinese name as the Political Warfare College. Political warfare broadly means any form of warfare that does not involve the use of weaponry. The college's students receive combat and survival training during their summer vacations, since if war comes they may find themselves on the front line, leading a platoon, and without this experience they would lack the necessary skills.
NDMC students, on the other hand, are taught the logistics of handling large numbers of casualties, which differ substantially from civilian hospital routines. "Unlike regular schools, which focus mainly on academic affairs, we provide an all -around education," says Gen. Chang Nai-tung, assistant commandant of Fu Hsing Kang College. "We demand a high level of academic performance from our students, and we're even more demanding when it comes to things like their military specialty, physical strength, discipline, loyalty, and the development of a sound personality."
Even though they are operating in a military environment, today's students are treated with much more humanity than their predecessors. "When I was a student thirty years ago, discipline was everything," recalls Col. Shen Chien-yeh, the NDMC's executive dean. "Everything professors or more senior students said were orders that couldn't be questioned. Now students have no hesitation in speaking up if they don't agree, which is good."
In practice, most military schools divide the campus into learning areas and living areas. In the learning areas, students are treated exactly the same as those in a regular school. Senior students only have the right to "instruct" their juniors, for example by assigning fifty push-ups for no reason, when they are in the living areas. Senior students seldom exercise such rights nowadays, however, because the latest buzzword is "self-management." "If we want our students to develop good self-management skills, we must give them the opportunity to practice during their schooldays," says Colonel Lu Su, a professor at CCIT and its deputy director of academic affairs.
As far as course content is concerned, a military education appears to offer much more than its civilian counterpart. But what about quality? How does the military compare when it comes to things like environment, facilities, and faculties? In practice, many non-combatant courses are taught by top professors drawn from non-military institutions, and most military academies have facilities and campuses that are the envy of regular schools. NDMC's Col. Shen Chien-yeh says that one reason why they started to enroll self-funded students was to let more people have access to their advanced equipment and other resources. "If you look at the numbers enrolled at a typical medical college and compare them with ours, and then look at the respective resources, you might even call it a waste of resources not to enroll self-funded students."
Whether in terms of content or quality, it seems this military education "product" is at least as good as--if not better than--its competitors. But products need to be marketed and advertised. In the past, the marketing was undertaken by individual schools and high-school or college military instructors. In 1999, however, the MND established its Recruiting Center to take over this responsibility. Gen. Yao Chiang points out that the "good men should not be made into soldiers" concept still exists, but young people are becoming more and more independent, and to a certain extent they are starting to be influenced by the concept of heroism. So, despite the competitiveness of the market, the center did a pretty good job in its first year. As the result of more than 8,000 seminars, shows, and campus activities, the number of people applying to take military school entrance exams grew by 25 percent over the previous year.
Nevertheless, the center has encountered problems with recruitment to two categories of school. First, the ROC does not have enough military pilots, the reason being that few high-school graduates can meet the obligatory eyesight standard. Second, junior-college-level programs find few takers. "When entering an ordinary college is so easy, there's no reason to choose junior college," Yao Chiang says. "In other words, this product hasn't been made attractive enough, which in turn makes it difficult to market."
In an attempt to make itself even more competitive, the center has done a number of surveys on how military students feel about their education. A lot of respondents complained about the tough time they had during the first nine weeks of military training, but on the whole it seems that most of them are quite happy with it. Hsiao Po-jen, a fourth-year student in the NDMC's medical department, recalls how his mother came to visit him during his basic training, wanting to take him home because she had heard how tough it was. She failed in her mission, however, because there were so many trainees milling around that she could not find her son. "Looking back now," Hsiao says thoughtfully, "I'm glad she didn't find me."