February 12, 2000	atimes.com

China THE MIDDLE KINGDOM: Dissing Taiwan's weapons By Bradley Martin Beijing experts have been going public lately with disdainful assessments of Taiwan's weaponry capabilities. The latest occurrence is an article by Beijing military strategist Zhang Daji in this month's China Review, published in Hong Kong. As summarized by the PRC-owned Zhongguo Tonxun She (China News Agency), the article says Taiwan's hope of developing offensive weapons that would be up to the challenge of fighting against an attack from the mainland is doomed to be dashed. Taiwan's actual conditions are such that its only possible route for developing such weapons is via land-based, ground-to-ground, short-range and intermediate-range missiles. It did develop such missiles in the '80s and the '90s, the short-range (100-200km) Ching-feng type and the intermediate range (800-1,000km) Sky-Horse. But neither led to ''combat capability''. Worse, Taiwan learned how to build only ''second-generation'' missiles, whereas countries more advanced in weaponry have already deployed third- and fourth-generation missiles using solid fuel and offering greater mobility and accuracy. ''In a real war, missiles with ranges shorter than 1,000km only play a tactical supportive role and are devoid of strategic significance,'' Zhang says. The article argues that any missiles Taiwan can build and deploy would fare no better than Iraq's hapless Scuds did during the Gulf War. ''If Taiwan possesses missile capability and if a war breaks out in the Taiwan Strait, those missiles will surely be the main targets of the mainland attack. Given Taiwan's narrow space, the possibility of these missiles escaping destruction in the first wave and in consequent waves of attack is really not that great.'' A similar putdown is found in an earlier article in Hong Kong's non-mainland-owned Ming Pao (Nov 30), quoting mainland military intelligence sources. In that case the target of derision is the foreign, mainly American, weaponry Taiwan has bought. Arms the island republic has purchased abroad have ''at most 60 percent real combat effectiveness, with a severe parts shortage, leaving Taiwan in a military dead-end'', the mainland sources are quoted as saying. The F-16A/B fighter ''has many design flaws, poor peformance and a high accident rate, with over 300 severe quality defects including an ineffective main engine, a navigation system with a poor record, an error-prone computer and dysfunctional displays and parts. ''The F-16 is designed for the average American pilot height of 1.83 meters, with Taiwan pilots flying the plane always having trouble reaching the controls.'' Mainland China's Taiwan-watchers have found in observing exercises that as a result the Taiwan pilots are five to seven seconds slower than American pilots in performing maneuvers. The list goes on. The F5E Tiger fighter ''is a low-performance cheap foreign-aid fighter that the United States made especially for poor and weak small countries''. And Taiwan was sold ''the most deficient'' series of E-2 early warning planes, ''with the United States having removed certain key modules before sale for security''. As for ships, the US sold Taiwan frigates that ''have sonar equipment with poor noise effect, so they cannot move at high speed in anti-submarine operations''. The mainland intelligence studies found that ''what the United States has sold to Taiwan is essentially all outdated arms that the US military has phased out''. The French Lafayette-class frigate, on the other hand, is advanced - but ''it did not include the advanced ship guns, or the new ship-to-air vertical launch system and electronics sytem. So Taiwan was forced to deploy US missiles on a French warship'' to the detriment of combat effectiveness. Beijing's leaks of such dismissive analysis are, of course, aimed at intimidating and discouraging Taiwanese in the run-up to the presidential election. An obvious hope is to influence scared voters to reject the more independence-oriented candidates for fear their military could not cope with what China might do. The other side of the coin, of course, is that Taiwan's most ardent defenders in the United States could find backing here for their goal of further arming the island. But the leakers may well hope Taiwan has lost some of its taste for US weaponry. (Special to Asia Times Online)

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