Taiwan holds massive Han Kuang military drills as tensions with China build

In response, Taiwan’s military scrambles Indigenous Defense Fighter (IDF) jets and tanks, while ground troops detonate explosives to stop the advancement.The scenes are part of the week-long Han Kuang exercises held across “China demands the US take concrete actions to fulfill its commitment not to support ‘Taiwan independence’ and not to arrange for Pelosi to visit Taiwan,” China’s Ministry of Defense spokesperson Tan Kefei said Tuesday in response to questions over Pelosi’s reported trip to Taipei.”If the US insists on taking its own course, the Chinese military will never sit idly by, and it will definitely take strong actions to thwart any external force’s interference and separatist’s schemes for ‘Taiwan independence,’ and resolutely defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Tan added. A week-long military exercise The Han Kuang exercises are the biggest annual live-fire drills of their type held each year in Taiwan, a democratically-ruled island of 24 million. On Tuesday, with Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen watching on, the island’s military simulated an attack on the Su’ao Naval Base, a major military port in northeastern Taiwan, with its forces playing the roles of both aggressor and defender. For two hours, Mirage 2000 and F-16 jets scrambled to intercept war planes invading from the east; helicopters played cat and mouse with submarines; and guided-missile destroyers fired cannon, missiles and torpedoes at an imagined armada bearing down on the shore.The drills demonstrate “the ability and determination of our military in defending our country,” Tsai told the troops afterward. It’s likely the Chinese military will be among those taking the keenest interest in how the drills play out.Such assessments have put the spotlight on how Taiwan could best respond in the event of an invasion.Chang Yan-ting, who served as a former deputy commander of Taiwan’s air force, told CNN that Taiwan needs to learn from Ukraine in combating a larger invading force and accelerate its development of asymmetric warfare capabilities.Rather than focusing on conventional weapons like tanks, he said Taiwan should develop and purchase new long-range missiles that could hit China’s military facilities in the event of war. “Taiwan is different from Ukraine in that we are an island and densely populated, so it would be difficult for residents to evacuate from Taiwan if war breaks out,” Chang said. Hence, the Taiwanese military should focus its strategy on blocking China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from landing in the first place, rather than retreating to the hinterland and risking battles in densely populated cities. “We should prioritize an asymmetric warfare strategy that prevents Taiwan from becoming a war zone,” he said. “We can do that by urgently boosting our long-range strike capabilities, so that we can hit enemy targets and eliminate their forces in (China’s) Fujian province if they launch an attack, or if they attempt to cross the Taiwan Strait.” “That way, we can protect the lives of our ordinary citizens as much as possible — as well as the financial capital that our people worked so hard to build on our land over the last seven decades.” Additional reporting by Walid Berrazeg in Taipei