Taiwan has been conducting drills designed to keep troops on alert and display the country's combat readiness, but are the exercises applicable during a war? To find out, TaiwanPlus spoke to Kelly Grieco, a security analyst with the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C.
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00:00 So Taiwan's military has just wrapped up these exercises ahead of the Lunar New Year, and
00:04 one of the first drills involved these C-130 airplanes, these really big transport aircraft.
00:10 They play a huge role in providing logistics for Taiwan.
00:14 But in the event of a conflict, how applicable is this kind of drill?
00:19 The first red flag I have there is what airfields do they believe they're going to be using
00:23 in wartime that will not be destroyed by Chinese missiles to be able to move material that
00:29 way.
00:30 To me, that's just not going to be a viable way to do it.
00:35 So they need to be thinking about other ways to do that, whether that's having convoys
00:40 and thinking about how to create decoys in terms of vehicles on the ground.
00:44 Ukraine has been quite successful at that, about using decoys in that way.
00:48 But I think what's really important is to practice in these exercises things that are
00:53 actually going to be viable in wartime.
00:55 And you can see 130s, for example, is something that doesn't strike me as particularly viable.
01:00 Another exercise that Taiwan conducted simulated how it would plant sea mines in the ocean
01:06 in the Taiwan Strait.
01:07 How applicable is that kind of drill in the sense of pushing more towards that asymmetric
01:12 strategy?
01:13 One of the things that is useful about sea mines is they're relatively cheap and you
01:19 can deploy them in different ways, including easily deploy them just from ships themselves.
01:24 And it doesn't have to be even a military vessel.
01:26 If you have training, you can train civilian fishermen how to put these over.
01:31 But one of the things that's really useful about sea mines is that they can really delay
01:35 an adversary because China has the same problem that the United States would have in a mining
01:43 area where you have to clear the mines or you have to at least clear a portion of them
01:48 so your vessels can get through.
01:51 And the reality is there's not an easy way to do that really quickly.
01:55 It simply takes time.
01:57 But time is the one thing that Taiwan is going to want to try to create if it finds itself
02:03 in a conflict.
02:04 And I just want to get your thoughts on this, Kelly, on the sense of the direction that
02:08 Taiwan is going in terms of these military exercises.
02:11 Is this more for show or are these actually applicable if a conflict were to happen?
02:16 Well, I think what I would say is, first of all, is that logistics is incredibly important
02:21 in war.
02:22 And there's a tendency sometimes to focus on the shiny objects, the things that shoot
02:28 and the new technology and what it can do.
02:30 But none of that matters if you don't keep weapons armed with ammunition, you don't keep
02:35 soldiers fed.
02:37 That stuff doesn't really matter.
02:39 And we can see that in the Ukraine war.
02:41 One of the real advantages Ukraine has had relative to Russia is that they've been much
02:46 better at logistics.
02:47 Logistics has been a major weakness for the Russians.
02:50 So it's just it's really fundamental to war, even if it's not the most sexy of topics.
02:55 I think exercising that, that's the closest you can get to an actual conflict situation
03:02 without conflict.
03:03 But practicing that, because there's so much you learn by actually trying to do that.
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