There have been reports in the past few weeks that President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) has instructed the Executive Yuan to set aside additional funding for national security. This was confirmed on Thursday when the Cabinet unveiled its budget proposal for fiscal 2021.
The headline figure from the announcement was that defense expenditure would increase by NT$15.6 billion (US$528.1 million), or 4.4 percent, from this year.
More funding has been allocated for the purchase of military hardware and to maintain existing programs. That means that after deducting expenditure that has already been allocated to the nation’s indigenous ship and submarine programs, as well as the NT$29 billion in funding set aside for the purchase of F-16V jets from the US, the total defense budget would only moderately increase from the original estimate of NT$361 billion to NT$366.8 billion.
During a speech in 2016 at a Washington think tank Project 2049 Institute forum, former US deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia Abraham Denmark said that “Taiwan’s defense budget has not kept pace with the threat developments [from China] and should be increased.”
Denmark called for year-on-year increases to the nation’s defense budget, which should be focused on the Taiwan Strait and China, and on bolstering the defense of Taiwan proper.
Although there has been a lack of an obvious enemy threat to China in the past few years, Beijing has expanded its military power far beyond its own defensive needs, so that it poses an extreme threat to Taiwan’s national security.
As a result, Washington has consistently made it clear that it wants Taiwan to allocate a minimum of 3 percent of its GDP to defense.
The national defense budget is the most substantive and concrete expression of a nation’s defense policy.
One of the most important defense policies implemented by Tsai and her administration after gaining power in 2016 was a public commitment to increase defense spending to 3 percent of GDP.
However, during her administration’s first four years in office, every year annual spending on defense has failed to reach even 2 percent of GDP. In each of the last two years of Tsai’s first term, defense spending was only about 1.84 percent of GDP.
For a number of years, there has been a consensus among military experts in the US and Europe that the Taiwan Strait is the area most likely to experience a military conflict.
If Taiwan wants to demonstrate to the world its strong will to resist an enemy and its determination to defend itself, the government must not only continue to invest in asymmetric war fighting capabilities, it must also step up the development of coastal defense submarines and bolster Taiwan’s various missile defense capabilities.
Most important is that the government must continue to increase defense spending until it reaches 3 percent of GDP.
Yao Chung-yuan is an adjunct professor and former deputy director of the Ministry of National Defense’s strategic planning department.
Translated by Edward Jones
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