Despite fundamental differences between the conflict in the Middle East and a possible war across the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan’s National Defense Ministry announced this week that it has set up a task force to monitor the situation in Israel.
At a briefing on Thursday, National Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng told journalists that the sudden escalation of the conflict between Israel and Hamas has pushed Taiwan to enhance its ability to forecast possible threats.
“The initial [lesson] is that intelligence work is very important,” Chiu told reporters ahead of a meeting at the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s legislature.
“With intelligence, many countermeasures can be made. A war can even be avoided,” he said.
Chiu added that Taiwan’s military has been monitoring the situation around the island and paying attention to any signs of Chinese military advances.
China claims democratically ruled Taiwan is a part of its territory and has not ruled out using force to achieve its goal of unification with the island. U.S. military and intelligence officials assess that China's military has been ordered to be ready to take Taiwan by force, perhaps as early as 2025.
Analysts note that Taiwan’s military routinely creates task forces to learn from conflicts.
Such task forces usually focus on the potential impact of those conflicts on the Taiwan Strait and tracking new strategies or weapons that may emerge in those conflicts.
Over the past year, Beijing has amped up its pressure on Taiwan, holding two large rounds of war games near the island. It has also sent almost daily sorties of dozens of fighter jets as well as naval vessels toward the island and around its north and southern tip.
Drawing lessons
Analysts agree that improving Taiwan’s intelligence gathering and analysis capabilities is one important lesson to be drawn.
“For Taiwan, the most important thing is whether the intelligence it has gathered can help Taipei prepare for potential military conflicts,” Lin Ying-yu, a military expert at Tamkang University in Taiwan, told VOA in a phone interview.
Lin said that Taiwan should also assess whether it can promptly mobilize its forces and whether its forces can react to sudden attacks swiftly.
“In light of Israel’s intelligence failure, I think Taiwan’s defense ministry has a good grasp of the Chinese military’s activities and capabilities,” Su Tzu-yun, a military expert at the Taipei-based Institute for National Defense and Security Research, told VOA by phone.
According to Su, Taiwan’s defense ministry recorded unprecedented deployment of Chinese military aircraft, naval vessels and missiles during last month’s military exercise near the southern province of Fujian.
“These discoveries show Taiwan’s ability to track China’s military movements, and such information allows Taiwan to make more accurate strategic judgments,” he said.
Mobilization
Despite Israel’s initial intelligence failure, its ability to mobilize more than 300,000 reservists rapidly after the initial Hamas’ attack has caught the attention of many in Taiwan. Some Taiwanese citizens have expressed doubt about Taiwan’s ability to call up reservists in the event of a war against China.
“It will be hard for Taiwan to draft 300,000 reservists within a short period of time, and I also have serious doubts about the combat readiness of Taiwan’s reservists,” Jenny Chiang, a 45-year-old Taiwanese woman who lives in the southern city of Tainan, told VOA by phone.
Su said Taiwan has 2.2 million reservists, at least 260,000 of whom are younger reservists who can be immediately called up in a potential war with China.
“Over the past years, reservists’ turnout rate at military training is around 98 or 99%, which is high,” he told VOA.
While Taiwan may be able to call up enough reservists in times of war, Tamkang University’s Lin said it is unclear whether Taiwan can allocate enough equipment for all the reservists.
“When Israel’s reservists arrived, all the equipment was ready,” he said. “While I think Taiwan can mobilize enough reservists in time, there’s a question about whether Taiwan can obtain enough equipment for all of them.”
Potential attack
As the U.S. contemplates the level of its involvement in the war, some Taiwanese citizens worry China could see an opportunity to attack Taiwan if Washington were to be dragged into the conflict in the Middle East.
“I’m worried that the Chinese government might be waiting for the U.S. and its Western allies to get involved in the war between Israel and Hamas and use the opportunity to launch some kind of attack on Taiwan,” Andrew Hsu, a 31-year-old Taiwanese man in Taipei City, told VOA by phone.
Despite similar concerns expressed by some people on Taiwan, some analysts say U.S. involvement in the conflict in the Middle East would not come at the expense of Washington’s support for Taiwan.
“The response that the U.S. is showing in the Middle East and the ships that the U.S. is sending to the region are not the same as the ones that would come to Taiwan,” said Lev Nachman, an expert on U.S.-Taiwan relations at National Chengchi University in Taiwan.
Since Chinese President Xi Jinping has reacted cautiously to the war in Ukraine and the conflict between Israel and Hamas, Nachman said, it suggests that a Chinese attack on Taiwan in the coming days is unlikely.
“Xi has shown that he [prefers to] wait and see how the world responds to the war than trying to make a move in the middle of an [evolving] conflict,” he told VOA. “The Ukraine war didn’t immediately lead to an invasion of Taiwan, and we won’t see that happen here either.”
Su said that since Taiwan is separated from China by the Taiwan Strait, any movement of Chinese troops or any sign of them preparing for an invasion would be much more obvious.
“I think Taiwan will learn from Israel and Ukraine’s experiences and further strengthen the Taiwanese military’s readiness,” he told VOA.
