Taiwan’s annual Han Kuang military exercise is now in its third day. A key focus this year is on drills that disperse military aircraft to keep them safe from attack.
00:00Taiwan's annual Hanguang military exercise is now in its third day.
00:04A major part of the exercise is drills featuring the country's military aircraft.
00:09For more on those, our defense reporter Haimei Okan joins us live from our newsroom in Taipei.
00:14Haimei, what's the latest with these exercises?
00:18That's right. So Hanguang is pretty much a practice run for how Taiwan would defend against an all-out invasion from China.
00:25And a big part of that is practicing how to best utilize Taiwan's fighter jets.
00:29So we're now getting more updates from the military as well as new footage from the Air Force,
00:33which shows a variety of different fighter jets taking off and leaving to other bases that are in different parts of the country around Taiwan.
00:41The military says that's part of a force preservation plan, basically trying to protect as many of its fighter jets as possible.
00:48That's a pretty standard part of the country's overall defense strategy, where we'll see fighter jets that are on the west coast,
00:54so the side that's closer to China.
00:56They'll fly to the east to cities like Hualien and to Taitung, away from a potential front line and from the safety of the central mountain region.
01:04Specifically, one base in Hualien, Jiasan Air Force Base, can reportedly hold up to 300 fighter jets alone inside the mountains where the base is located.
01:14Now, for more on this, I spoke to Lauren Dickey.
01:17She's a non-resident senior fellow at the China Power Project based in Washington, D.C.
01:22And I asked her, what is it specifically about this jewel that's so significant for Taiwan?
01:27You don't want to have all of your crown jewels of anything in one location.
01:33And so whether that's dispersing them across the F-16 fleet, in this case, or other aircraft, dispersing them across the island or dispersing them even beyond the island,
01:45just getting them off of Taiwan and flying them in the airspace to the east of Taiwan, for instance, in a crisis,
01:52that gives them some flexibility to not be basically stationary targets that could be seen or tracked by the PRC otherwise.
02:01Looking at the war in Ukraine, which Taiwan's military says it's taking lessons from,
02:06what do you think we can learn specifically about the Air Force?
02:09I think if there's one thing that we should all be disavowed of after Ukraine is the notion that an Air Force can just be rendered moot by a superior adversary
02:20or an adversary that outnumbers or outqualifies your own Air Force, right?
02:25Like, the Ukrainians figured out how to use their fixed-wing Air Force to effect against Russia
02:33in a very, like, geographically confined, probably electromagnetically complex war fight, right?
02:42And if Ukraine can figure that out, I think that we should probably stop saying that Taiwan won't have an Air Force.
02:50To me, it's really a question of how do we make that Air Force as potent and survivable as possible
02:58for as long as we can, you know, in the opening days and weeks of any conflict.
03:03Now, as Hanguan continues, more and more military equipment and soldiers will start to make their way
03:12into the streets of major cities across Taiwan.
03:15And so the military has issued a statement apologizing if there's going to be any inconvenience for people that are here in Taiwan.
03:21Thanks for that update, Jaime.
03:25That was Jaime Okan live from our newsroom in Taipei.
