Military might and political
messages By Mac William
Bishop
TAIPEI - Military exercises often have as
much political use as tactical utility, and this week,
China, Taiwan and the US all have conducted major
exercises in or around the Taiwan Strait. These
maneuvers send messages about the various countries'
intentions in the Taiwan Strait.
China's
exercises
began on July 16 and were scheduled to end Friday,
July 23. Meanwhile, the United States' global Summer
Pulse 2004 exercises, which began in mid-July and will
last until mid-August, have moved to the Western Pacific
region this week. Taiwan also is holding its annual
Han Kuang (Han glory) exercises, which began on
Wednesday, July 21, and will last until July 28.
The fact that the exercises are being
conducted virtually simultaneously is neither an accident
nor coincidental. It is also no accident that former
Chinese president Jiang Zemin, now the chairman of the
Communist Party's Central Military Commission, was quoted in
a Hong Kong daily Wen Wei Po last week as
in essence promising to attack Taiwan (seen as a
wayward province) before or around the year 2020. The comments
were made as China kicked off a major military
exercise on Dongshan Island near China's southeast
coast, only 280 kilometers from Taiwanese territory.
Yet even as China was showing off
its military might near the Taiwan Strait, the US was
conducting its own show of force in the Western Pacific,
with an exercise called Summer Pulse 2004. This
exercise is one of the largest naval drills the US has
conducted in years, involving seven carrier strike groups - more
than 120 warships, all over the world. The Pacific aspect of
the exercise was widely interpreted by Taiwanese, as well
as some Chinese and US pundits, as constituting a
direct challenge to China.
The commander of
US Pacific Forces, Admiral Thomas B Fargo, was in
Beijing on a routine regional tour, and he was warned
on Friday by Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing to stop
military exchanges and arms sales to Taiwan. This is
precisely what Li told US National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice last week. Li said nothing about Summer
Pulse 2004.
US military officials confirmed that
the exercise was serving a purpose in this regard, but
said it was an exaggeration to say that Summer Pulse was
being held exclusively for the benefit of Taiwan and
China. "It's a lie to say that the exercise is directed
at China, but then again, it's a lie to say that it is
not," a senior US defense source told the Asia Times
Online.
Scheduling exercises no
coincidence The
scheduling of these exercises is no
accident, the source said, speaking on condition he not
be identified further. There were very clear reasons that
the US would choose to conduct parts of Summer Pulse
in the Western Pacific at the same time that China and
Taiwan were conducting their own exercises: to demonstrate
the United States' ability to project power and to
show China that the US can still play a deterrent role
in the region, despite its other operational commitments
worldwide, as in the Middle East.
In short,
the exercises are being held by the US to remind China
that it is still serious about its commitment to defend
Taiwan.
China has consistently vowed that it
would unify with the democratic island of Taiwan at any
cost. High-ranking party officials and senior People's
Liberation Army (PLA) officers in the past have said
that Beijing is willing to go to war to prevent Taiwan
from becoming an independent country, and Taipei and
Beijing have yet to agree to formal negotiations about
Taiwan's status.
Political tensions between the
two rivals have increased with the controversial
re-election of Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian, and
his administration's plan to formulate a new
constitution is particularly worrying to Beijing. Chen
promised in his inauguration speech on May 20 to confine
the constitutional revisions to matters of
administration and governance, and to avoid sensitive
topics related to sovereignty.
"I am fully aware
that consensus has yet to be reached on issues related
to national sovereignty, territory and the subject of
unification versus independence," Chen said. "Therefore,
let me explicitly propose that these particular issues
be excluded from the present project of constitutional
re-engineering."
This pledge, however, did not
assuage Beijing's fears that Chen had, in effect,
established a timeline for independence.
China has, therefore,
sought to employ various forms of pressure on Taiwan
to remind the island's leaders that it was and
remains deadly serious about preventing any slide
toward independence. Jiang Zemin's comments and the
publicity surrounding the PLA's military exercises can be interpreted in
this light.
The exercises,
in which 18,000 troops reportedly took part, have
been conducted only 280km from the Taiwanese-controlled
Penghu islands, also called the Pescadores. China's
exercises are designed to demonstrate that country's
ability to carry out joint operations, or missions
involving naval, air and ground forces. These would be
vital in carrying out a successful attack on Taiwan.
China seeks to demonstrate air
superiority According to Hong Kong's Ta Kung Pao
newspaper, one of the primary goals of the exercises was
to demonstrate China's ability to gain air superiority
over Taiwan. Proving that it could control the air over
the Taiwan Strait is of paramount importance to China,
as the PLA Air Force (PLAAF) has long been outclassed by
its Taiwanese counterpart, both in terms of the quality
of its aircraft and the training of its pilots,
according to some defense analysts.
However, the
combination of increased defense spending by China and
structural problems with Taiwan's military is beginning
to erode the qualitative superiority of Taiwan's Air
Force, according to the US Department of Defense's most
recent report to the US Congress on China's military
capabilities.
"The [Taiwanese] Air Force's
recently completed transition from 1960s fighter
aircraft to modern 'fourth generation' [advanced
aircraft such as the US-made F-16 or the French-made
Mirage 2000-5] units retains many of the qualitative
advantages over the PLAAF. However, fighter pilot
shortages are stressing personnel, and training is
conservative and overemphasizes defensive counter-air
missions," according to the report, Fiscal Year 2004
Report to Congress on PRC Military Power.
Correcting China's relative lack of "fourth
generation" fighter aircraft is one of Beijing's top
priorities. And as China's 2004 arms budget is about
US$26 billion (many analysts believe China's arms budget
is much higher than the official figures indicate), the
PLAAF will probably not have to go begging to acquire
advanced weapons systems.
"The PLAAF and the
PLANAF [PLA Naval Air Forces] are undergoing significant
upgrades, which include acquiring fourth-generation
aircraft, air defense systems, advanced munitions, and
C4ISR [command, control, communications, computers,
intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance]
equipment," the US Defense Department's report noted.
One of the reasons Beijing wants more capable
air forces is due to the Chinese strategy of preventing
intervention by "third parties" (ie the United States)
in the event of a Taiwan Strait conflict.
The US, which is by law committed to providing for
Taiwan's defense by selling weapons to the island, has in
the past shown its willingness to intervene in crises in
the Taiwan Strait. Notably, in 1996, former US
president Bill Clinton dispatched two aircraft-carrier battle
groups to the region after China began firing missiles
into the waters of the Taiwan Strait. The missile tests
were apparently designed to prevent the people of Taiwan
from voting for Lee Teng-hui, an avowed pro-independence
presidential candidate. The threats were unsuccessful -
in fact, some analysts believe they had an effect
opposite to that intended by China - and Lee won the
election.
Strategic cross-Strait balance
shifting to China However, the cross-Strait
strategic balance has been rapidly shifting in China's
favor over the past 10 years, and many analysts -
including experts at the Pentagon - are starting to
believe that the US would have a difficult time
intervening on Taiwan's behalf should China decide to
attack. Therefore, some elements of the US military want
to show China that the US could respond - in a very
substantial way.
Official statements from the US
Navy confirm that the primary purpose of the drills was
to demonstrate the US's ability to get ships where they
were needed as quickly as possible.
"We've
moved from our standard deployment pattern to the
Fleet Response Plan, where we promised the president of
the United States that we can put six carriers anywhere
in the world within 30 days, and [two more
carriers] shortly after that," Vice Admiral Michael McCabe,
the commander of the US Navy 3rd Fleet, said in a
statement on the US Pacific Command's website. "We've changed the
way we maintain, the way we train, the way we equip and
the way we deploy. As an example of that, this summer,
in what's called Summer Pulse, we will have seven
different aircraft carriers with their supporting ships
operating in five different theaters."
However,
a number of strategic assessments of possible "Taiwan
scenarios" indicate that many US defense officials
believe China is gaining the ability to defeat Taiwanese
forces before foreign militaries could intervene. The
US, then, is not relying on a purely military
containment strategy.
"Washington does not in any
way ignore China's military buildup and the possibility
that it might in the long term pose a
strategic challenge to the United States," said Richard
Bush, the director of the Center for Northeast Asian
Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in
Washington, DC. Bush is also a former director and
chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan, the US de
facto embassy in Taipei.
"But successive
administrations, Democratic and Republican alike,
believe that US interests will be best served by a PRC
[People's Republic of China] that is deeply integrated
into the international community," Bush said. "If, on
the other hand, the United States starts out by treating
China as our enemy, it will surely become our enemy."
US not trying to 'surround'
China Another US defense expert concurred with this
assessment.
"The United States policy toward China is
still an engagement policy. The long-term intentions of
China toward Taiwan and the rest of Asia are not clear,
but the US does not actively seek to contain China,"
said Larry Wortzel, the director of the conservative
Heritage Foundation's Davis Institute for International
Studies in Washington. Nor is the US "surrounding'
China", he said.
Taiwan, meanwhile, appears to
be trying to adapt to the changing military balance in
the Taiwan Strait, despite its relatively limited
resources. Taiwan's Legislative Yuan has approved a
nearly US$10 billion defense budget for this year, not
including a "special budget" of approximately $16
billion earmarked for the procurement of a number of
high-profile advanced weapons systems from the US. The
special defense budget is at present the source of
bitter debate within the Legislative Yuan, as many in
Taiwan feel the money could better be spent elsewhere.
Despite the lack of a consensus on priorities,
the military establishment in Taiwan is attempting to
carry on as usual. The country began conducting its
annual Han Kuang series of military
exercises on Wednesday. The exercises, criticized by some
observers as unimaginative and pointless, include a mock
counter-landing operation, a rehearsal of an airborne
assault, and several live-fire exercises.
But
one of the most highly anticipated events in this year's
exercise took place on Wednesday, when Taiwan's air
force landed two Mirage fighter aircraft on the Sun
Yat-sen Freeway in central Taiwan. When the freeway was
built in the 1970s, several portions were designed to be
used as temporary or emergency runways in the event of a
war with China. Taiwan has five such freeways, several
portions of which could theoretically be used as
emergency airfields.
But the hype surrounding the
landings was dismissed by some observers. "Landing on the freeway is
no different from landing on a regular runway,"
said retired Taiwanese army general Shui Hua-ming. "The only difference
is, well, it is the freeway, not an airport."
One foreign defense analyst held a different
view. "The freeway landings are good, because it shows
that Taiwan's military is trying something different,"
the analyst said, on condition of anonymity. "Usually,
every year it was the same thing. They hold the same
anti-amphibious landing exercise, blow up the same
beach, and then turn around and everyone claps," he
said.
Taiwan still hasn't fortified its
airfields and hangars to increase their survivability in
the event of a "saturation attack" by the PLA's Second
Artillery Corps (China's missile forces), so the country
was still vulnerable to the more than 500 short- and
medium-range missiles that are deployed across the
Strait, targeting Taiwan.
"This is a good sign,"
the analyst said. "It shows that Taiwan's military is
willing to take a few risks and look for new
alternatives to defend Taiwan."
Mac
William Bishop is a journalist based in Taipei.
Comments or queries may be sent tomwbtaiwan@hotmail.com
.
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