With military pressure from China growing, 22 legislators from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), led by retired admiral Richard Chen (陳永康), recently submitted a National Security Strategy bill to the legislature.
President William Lai’s (賴清德) Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration has taken few initiatives in this regard and is compelled to be reactive, especially because the DPP only has a minority in the legislature.
Amid intensified bipartisan political strife, the KMT seems to be effectively waging a veiled offensive against the DPP’s Achilles heel in military-strategic issues.
This is because the DPP has a dearth of talent and experience due to the legacy of its political struggle against the postwar authoritarian KMT party-state regime in which the party controlled the military. The legacy remains conspicuous in light of personal ties, mindset and world outlook at the military leadership level.
Nonetheless, the bill follows an orthodox approach that emulates the US’ standards.
This approach first formulates a National Security Strategy (NSS) that defines vital national interests and develops a grand design that combines overall national power, both military and non-military.
Second, a National Defense Strategy (NDS) that identifies military strategic objectives and means, particularly weapons acquisition, is created.
Third is a National Military Strategy (NMS) that sets operational guidelines.
The US, as a global military power, has continually tried to meet new major security challenges, while its allies have adjusted accordingly, with a focus on coordination of their external and internal policies.
As referred to in the bill’s text, the bill pays particular attention to Japan as a model. Yet, during the Cold War, Japan had little need to formulate an NSS as it had a crystal-clear basic grand strategy of putting the Japan-US alliance into the military-strategic axis.
The country had been alright with formulating its versions of just the NDS and NMS.
However, with the Cold War over, the country is increasingly facing a growing need for operational coordination with the US, requiring a shared strategy language and intellectual framework. In fact, Japan’s first NSS in 2013 included no grand-strategic shift, only bureaucratic policy documentation comparable to its US counterpart.
Japan’s second NSS of 2022 focuses more on the nexus of an NSS with an NDS, rather than on independent grand strategic thinking.
In this light, Taiwan’s need for an NSS is questioned. First, Taiwan’s grand strategy is already evident in that it would continue relying on the US as its sole security guarantor. Taiwan alone would never be able to counter China militarily and cannot but prevent Chinese invasion forces from establishing a “fait accompli,” at least for a month, until US forces come to the rescue by overcoming the tyranny of distance.
Given the significantly heightened risks and uncertainty of Beijing’s aggression, Taiwan has to concentrate on defense buildups and enhance military preparedness, in accordance with the already agreed line of asymmetric warfare.
Notably, prioritizing the formulation of an NSS is tenable as a solid systematic approach, but only in peacetime. In semi-wartime, it is imperative to act while thinking, not to first think and then act.
A whole-of-government approach for policy coordination is a prerequisite for Taiwan’s survival since the country has comparatively limited strength and resources to deploy against a more powerful China.
In this light, those who drafted the bill are in thrall to the preconception that a good NSS per se enables full policy coordination, as shown by the stipulation that an NSS document shall be completed, at worst, within four months.
It is one thing to complete an NSS as a document, but quite another to make it an effective tool.
More important is the process in which an overwhelming majority of various stakeholders understand, accept and cooperate to implement the proposed policy line, including those who would be most negatively affected in terms of budget allocation and career-building. In fact, Japan’s NSS of 2013 and 2022 required one-and-a-half to two years to formulate, including preliminary preparations at the prelude stage.
Practically, effective policy coordination is hardly achievable from scratch. In fact, Japan has accumulated, for about fifty years, the practice of conducting energy, food and other non-military security policy coordination under “comprehensive security,” originally in response to economic disturbances during the oil crises in 1973 and 1979.
In addition, Japan has a track record in not only whole-of-government mobilization of resources and human power, but also crisis management for natural disasters such as major earthquakes and typhoons and capability-building of civil defense. Taipei lacks these critical building blocks on which to construct a resilient civil-defense system. Taipei needs them first, not an NSS.
Last, but not least, Taiwan can formulate an NSS through reinterpretation of the current legal system and should not spend too much effort studying the irrelevant US example.
It is based on the complete separation of power in which statutory requirement for an NSS is indispensable for legislative oversight. Given that Taiwan’s premier is answerable to the Legislative Yuan, an NSS would be subjected to its oversight as long as it is an official document of the Executive Yuan.
This is quite possible with strong political will and without partisan strife. Yet, these two conditions are not simply present at present. It is clear that the bill puts the cart before the horse.
Given the above military-strategic circumstances, time constraints and political conditions, Taiwan had better muddle through toward asymmetric warfare without an NSS.
Masahiro Matsumura is a professor of international politics and national security in the faculty of law at St Andrew’s University in Osaka and is a Taiwan fellow at the Taiwan Center for Security Studies in Taipei.
RSS