As Taiwan watches China prepare for an attack, it
must improve its defenses and assess the intentions
of its allies and enemies. A new book explores the
complicated challenges facing Taiwan as it defends
itself from the behemoth next door.
In the refrain from Rudyard Kipling's poem The Ballad of East and West , the poet hints at an unbridgeable gulf separating the thinking of the East and the West. "East is East, and West is West," he writes, "and never the twain shall meet." The sentiment would be an apt description of the differences in traditional Chinese and Western concepts of battle.
In the Chinese concept of war, victory could be secured by maneuver, both diplomatic and military, and with a minimum of bloodshed and savagery. This strategic impulse dates back at least to the 4th century B.C., when Sun Tzu, China's most celebrated strategist, wrote, "To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill." Although this view of war befits the antiquity and subtlety of a civilization that the Chinese like to point out dates back 5,000 years, Western military strategists found it baffling.
In Western military history, the decisive battle is written about in an almost religious tone. It is the day of reckoning, when the moral question of right is settled by the clash of great armies displaying, of course, great bravery.
As recently as the late 1930s, when the Japanese were slicing their way southward through the eastern coastal provinces of China, Western commanders noted with exasperation the tendency of the Chinese army to avoid battle. Joseph Stilwell, commander of Allied forces in China during World War II and nominal chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek, commented that the Chinese would not win a battle until, "they lose their inherent distaste for offensive combat."
The comment, recorded in Barbara Tuchman's biography of the expletive-spitting commander, was just one of a string of objections that Stilwell had to the conduct of the defense of the Republic of China, struggling for its existence less than three decades after its founding in 1912. Among Chiang's stratagems that irked the impatient and active Stilwell was the "strategic retreat." So effectively did Chiang employ the strategic retreat that he finally removed the entire Nationalist army and the Republic of China government from mainland China to the island of Taiwan in 1949.
Taiwan proved to be the end of the line for Chiang's failed defense strategies. In Taiwan, the government set out to remake the armed forces of the Republic of China, and today a very different defense establishment protects an island that leaves no room for retreat.
Defending Taiwan, a collection of essays by Taiwanese defense officials and local and Western academics, hopes to explain how the objectives of Taiwan's defense strategy have changed since the founding of the republic and just where the military is headed both in terms of structure, capability, and strategy. The book is the published record of a seminar entitled "Future Vision of Taiwan's Defense Policy and Military Strategy," held in Taipei in 2001 and sponsored by the domestic journal Taiwan Defense Affairs. The stated purpose of the seminar, and of the preparation of an English-language presentation of the 12 lectures in book format, is to expand the debate on Taiwan's defense issues among civilians and beyond the borders of Taiwan.
It proves to be an excellent primer for defense studies in one of the world's possible flash points for a world war. The essays are organized into five parts, which examine: "the external security environment," "the evolution of Taiwan's military strategy," "Taiwan's military modernization," "the cornerstones of Taiwan's defense vision," (which further examines recent changes in Taiwan's military thinking), and, in the conclusion, some concerns for Taiwan's future defense. As the sections indicate, the collection reflects the methods and approaches to defense studies. Scholars sift through the political and military indicators in mainland China and the US, the two countries that most influence Taiwan's defense posture; study the strength of the armed forces by looking at the history of arms purchases and changing relations between the military and society; and analyze the modernization of the three branches of the military. This pointillistic approach results in a good portrait of a complicated subject and reveals the lengths to which Taiwan has been willing to invest money and manpower to prevent an attack from the mainland. Ultimately, however, Taiwan will be outstripped in its arms race with mainland China, and the island must find new strategies to defend itself.
One of the strategies is the implementation of the "revolution in military affairs," (RMD), examined in a chapter by Jang-ruey Tzeng, director of academic affairs development at the National Defense University. This "revolution" is the integration of new technologies into the battlefield, intelligence collection, and computer warfare. So enormous are the implications for the conduct of warfare that Tzeng compares it to the effect on warfare of the Industrial Revolution.
RMD has become a fashionable subject for military thinkers in recent years primarily because of the spectacular effects of precision-guided munitions, long-range targeting techniques, and the coordination of ground, air, and naval forces that the United States displayed in its campaigns in the first and second Gulf wars as well as the air victory in the Kosovo Campaign. These campaigns, as well as the US invasion of Afghanistan, were closely watched by mainland China, which was reported to be alarmed by the blitz krieg tactics and the quick success of the military campaigns. The short of it is that Beijing is investing heavily in its own modernization while paring down troops numbers, and Taiwan in response is doing the same.
The book argues that the integration of technologies can increase the effectiveness of Taiwan's current military technologies. As Tzeng points out, this requires a high degree of technical training for Taiwan's soldiers. In recent decades, military schools and private technical universities have been priming officers to function in a high-tech combat environment. The government has decreased the size of the standing army, shortened the period of mandatory military service, and tried to cultivate a professional class of officers who can adapt to the dizzying pace of technological change. In short, RMD and the cultivation of a smaller, better-educated class of officers lies at the heart of Taiwan's recent defense modernizations.
The second possibility for Taiwan to counter the growing prowess of the People's Liberation Army and especially the forest of missiles growing across the Taiwan Strait is participation in a US-sponsored antimissile umbrella, known as theater missile defense (TMD). Some of the technology for the system is still in the works, but the possibility that Taiwan could stop missiles launched from the mainland is too tempting not to be investigated. In his chapter on TMD, Ming-hsien Wong, editor-in-chief of Taiwan Defense Affairs, makes a good case that reliable protection against Chinese missiles would ease the atmosphere of nagging insecurity in Taiwanese society. Yet, he also points out the danger of a Chinese response. China has indicated that it considers the development of a theater-missile-defense system in Asia as an offensive posture and would therefore not tolerate Taiwan's participation. This is the central dilemma for Taiwan's defense: How to prepare for a possible attack from the mainland without triggering a war by its defense posture or purchases.
The question indicates the importance to Taiwan's defense policy of understanding China's military and political positions. The examination of China's growing military threat is handled dexterously in an essay by Denny Roy, an expert on the People's Liberation Army. It underscores the extraordinary singularity of Taiwan's defense aims, namely, to repel an attack from across the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan has no other defense aims and no other possible points of conflict except those over a few disputed islands in the East and South China seas that are unlikely to be solved by force. China then is the sole threat to Taiwan's security. To understand China's attitude to Taiwan, Roy sheds light on the changing of China's own strategic environment. The warming of relations with Russia, for example, has allowed China to temporarily reduce forces guarding the border with Russia and focus more exclusively on Taiwan. Roy concludes that Beijing will be in a better position to invade Taiwan in 2010 than it is today and that Taiwan must not only strengthen its own defenses but also keep favor with Washington to offset the growing Chinese threat.
A question frequently heard in Taiwan is: Will the US defend Taiwan if China attacks? The present US position is couched in ambiguity. Washington has said that it would like to see the cross-Strait question resolved peacefully, but there is no explicit promise to aid the island if war breaks out. In an essay entitled "United States military security policy towards China," Kao-cheng Wang, a professor at Tamkang University, examines US policy toward China through the blurry lens of the Clinton years, a time when the US president beamed confusing signals to the region and generally pandered to the Chinese. The US relationship with China and its legal obligations to Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act are immensely complicated. The book could certainly have done with an update of US policy toward China under George W. Bush, but this reflects the date of the conference and not the fault of the author.
In the volume's conclusion, the authors indicate the importance of Taiwan's military dependence on the US, "on whom ultimately the security and protection of the island depends." The failure to take a broader look at US policy toward Taiwan and outline the conditions on which the US will probably defend Taiwan leaves many unanswered questions. Taiwan's primary ally is also a source of consternation to the island. On the one hand, the US praises Taiwan's remarkable transition from dictatorship to democracy. On the other, the one-China principle is central to US policy, and therefore limits Taiwan's democratic achievements to the state of a hothouse bloom unable to breathe the air of independence. Should the people of Taiwan choose independence, which Beijing has indicated could trigger a military response, will the US defend the island that it has armed and praised as a refuge of freedom?
As the book makes clear, Taiwan has wisely opened the debate over its defense policies and military strategies to the idea-factories of academia. But the ultimate defense of the island might lie in the management of its relations with the United States and Taiwan's constant campaign on the world stage for recognition of its remarkable democratization. War undoubtedly would be ruinous for Taiwan no matter what the outcome. To avoid war, Taiwan will need to maneuver through its diplomacy and its appeals to world opinion and employ all the traditional strategies of the ancients, except, of course, the strategic retreat.
Robert Green is a freelance writer currently residing in New York.
Copyright (c) 2004 by Robert Green.