Taiwan's 'Immediate Combat Readiness' Drills Tackle Gray-Zone Threats

TaiwanPlus News

Taiwan's military is starting a new kind of exercise this week, which the defense ministry says is intended to handle emerging gray-zone threats from China.

Transcript

00:00Taiwan is starting a new kind of military exercise this week.

00:04What the defense ministry says is to handle emerging threats from China.

00:09Our defense reporter Jaime Ocon has been following developments here in Taipei and joins us live

00:14from our newsroom.

00:15Jaime, can you explain more about these exercises?

00:18That's right.

00:21So the drills do start today and some people are calling them unprecedented.

00:25That's because they're the first of their kind.

00:27Now they don't have an official name, but a rough translation describes these as immediate

00:32combat readiness drills, which will be involving all branches of the military and will last

00:36for five days.

00:38Sources have told us that this kind of exercise will not involve any live fire, but simulates

00:43a situation in which China's gray zone warfare, gray zone activities, turn into an actual

00:48military attack.

00:50So this drill will see military units mobilizing and deploying to various defensive positions.

00:55China has already reacted to the exercises, sending 26 military aircraft as part of a

01:00patrol around waters around Taiwan.

01:04Many people are calling these exercises mini Hong Kong, of course referring to Taiwan's

01:08largest annual military exercises known as the Hong Kong drills, in which Taiwan simulates

01:13an all out attack from China.

01:16And so those exercises actually start at the end of July.

01:19And so one of the main goals of these drills is to get soldiers ready and warmed up for

01:23those larger scale exercises that will happen at the end of the summer.

01:28Jaime, why is this happening now?

01:30Is it a response to anything specific?

01:33No, not anything specific, but it's more of a combination of these gray zone threats that

01:39Taiwan has recently really started to see more of.

01:42Gray zone warfare, that term, it's aggressive actions that are definitely not peaceful,

01:47but it's also not a full act of war.

01:49These activities include suspicious cargo ships sailing around Taiwan, looking for undersea

01:54cables and most recently also psychological warfare.

01:58This morning, an official account from China's Ministry of State Security released the full

02:04names, photos and ID numbers of four individuals within Taiwan's military within the Information

02:10and Electronic Warfare Command.

02:12Now they say that they are henchmen, that they are so-called separatist forces supporting

02:17Taiwan independence.

02:19The Electronic Warfare Command responded to that using the same phrase that the Ministry

02:23of Defense used last time, saying that China is the biggest threat to security in the Indo-Pacific

02:29and that the military here will take any operations necessary in order to protect Taiwan's democracy.

02:34Now I want to go back to the military exercises that we're going to see because back in March,

02:39Taiwan's defense minister told us that one of the top priorities is for Taiwan to handle

02:43the gray zone threat.

02:44So these exercises this week, in which we see Taiwan's military spring into action and

02:49react quickly to these unusual and always not so usually defined threats, the frequency

02:55of these drills is something that I think we're going to see much more of in the future.

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