Protecting Taiwan Before Deterrence Fails

How can the Taiwan Policy Act help Taiwan?

Air Force soldiers clear the ground in front of an armed F-16V fighter jet during a drill at Hualien Air Force base in Hualien County, Taiwan, on Aug. 17, 2022. Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images

Commentary

What is missing in preparing Taiwan and the United States to protect Taiwan against the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) military aggression? This article describes the basic process for the United States, the Republic of China (ROC, Taiwan’s official name), their militaries to work together, and the legislation required.

Risk Analysis

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) proposes five ways an organization can respond to risk:

• Risk acceptance: Understand an identified risk, the potential cost or damage, and agree to accept the risk.
• Risk avoidance: Identify risk and decide not to engage in actions associated with the risk.
• Risk deterrence: Understand a posed threat, and inform the agent of that threat about retaliatory harm.
• Risk mitigation: Act to reduce risk.
• Risk transference/sharing: Share the risk burden with another entity, such as another country.

When two countries agree to conduct military training and exercises, they share risk and train for the possibility they will assist each other during a conflict. A minimum outcome is that both countries benefit from mutual learning based on the other’s experiences and become more efficient and effective in their lethality against a common enemy. By sharing risk, Taiwan mitigates the risk of fighting alone against China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and, one hopes, deters the CCP from ordering an invasion.

Step 1: Leadership, Political Will

Before the U.S. military can begin to fully collaborate with the ROC, senior American and Taiwanese political leaders must recognize that they have vital mutual interests to protect and use military force, if necessary.

In the U.S.-ROC case, the United States should make a political decision to militarily deter the CCP from ordering the PLA to conduct military operations against the ROC. Additionally, the U.S. and ROC presidents and their respective legislatures would have to approve U.S. and ROC forces working together.

Taiwan Policy Act

The Taiwan Policy Act (TPA), submitted to Congress on Sept. 28, demonstrates the political will to conduct combined training and exercises. The TPA justifies U.S. support for Taiwan by stating the following:

“It is a vital national security interest of the United States to defend Taiwan for the purposes of—

(A) mitigating the PLA’s ability to project power and establish contested zones within the First and Second Island Chains and limiting the PLA’s freedom of maneuver to conduct unconstrained power projection capabilities beyond the First Island Chain to protect United States territory, such as Hawaii and Guam;

(B) defending the territorial integrity of Indo-Pacific allies, such as Japan;

(C) deterring other countries and competitors from exercising force to revise the established status quo;

(D) championing democratic institutions and societies in the Indo-Pacific region and throughout the world; and

(E) maintaining a rules-based international order that—

(i) constrains authoritarian powers;

(ii) enshrines collective security;

(iii) promotes democracy and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms; and

(iv) promotes peace and prosperity.”

The TPA military training program “should prioritize relevant and realistic training, including as necessary joint United States-Taiwan contingency tabletop exercises, war games, full-scale military exercises, and an enduring rotational United States military presence that assists Taiwan in maintaining force readiness and utilizing United States defense articles and services transferred from the United States to Taiwan.”

Taiwan must also have the political will to approve combined planning and training with the U.S. military.

Taiwanese navy launches a U.S.-made Standard missile from a frigate during the annual Han Kuang Drill, on the sea near the Suao navy harbor in Yilan county, Taiwan, on July 26, 2022. Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images

Step 2: Senior Policy Reps Decide on the Framework

When the U.S. Congress, the Executive, and the Taiwanese government demonstrate the political will to work together, senior Pentagon leaders, in consultation with the Department of State and other agencies, including the intelligence community, will provide guidance to the U.S. delegation meeting with their Taiwanese counterparts. The guidance includes topics to discuss and avoid, and requests. In other words, senior decision-makers delegate to the U.S. delegation authority and discretion to negotiate certain topics. This process can take several months or a brief period in a crisis. The Taiwanese delegation would also undergo an analogous process.

When the countries’ senior political leaders agree on guiding principles and responsibilities based on their negotiation, the U.S. and ROC militaries would begin combined planning under the framework of security cooperation.

Step 3: Security Cooperation and Combined Planning

Planning falls under the framework of security cooperation, which includes any—or all—of the following issues: defense contacts and familiarization, personnel exchange, combined exercises and training, train and equip/provide defense articles, defense institution building, operational support, education, and international armaments cooperation. Fortunately, Taiwan and the United States have a long security cooperation relationship that includes many of those listed. Unfortunately, the security cooperation has not included combined planning, exercises, and training.

The U.S. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms defines “combined” as a “term identifying two or more forces or agencies of two or more allies operating together.” Thus, the third step involves several iterations of meetings and documentation that consider each country’s “laws, doctrine, organization, weapons, equipment, capacities, terminology, culture, politics, religion, language, and objectives,” and each country’s military “operational, legal, and logistical constraints and restraints … and facilitates operational planning that optimizes each contributing nation’s military capabilities.”

Planning requires several iterations of bilateral meetings to develop plans and identify tasks that focus on warfighting goals and objectives. These plans determine the framework for future training and exercises.

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Kidd and U.S. Coast Guard cutter Munro conduct Taiwan Strait transits on Aug. 27, 2021. U.S. Navy/Handout via Reuters

Step 4: Combined Training

The fourth step involves taking the combined planning agreed upon in the third step and conducting military exercises and training to ensure efficient and effective use of both countries’ military “capabilities, capacities, and authorities to accomplish those tasks.”

For example, Taiwan and the United States would have to agree on a targeting process, including target approval, target deconfliction, no-strike targets, preventing friendly fire incidents, and many more. A good example of a combined targeting doctrine is NATO’s doctrine for targeting: “Allied Joint Doctrine for Joint Targeting.”

Step 5: Plan Execution

If deterrence fails, then the combined nations’ military is prepared to fight together.

Like the higher-level policy meetings, both sides conduct meetings to ensure a smooth transition from initial warning of an actual operation to deployment, bed down, infrastructure, and operations, through returning to base.

 Step 6: Continuous Improvement, Lessons Learned

Each time an exercise, training event, or even an operational event occurs, all military units want to improve so that the next time they do not repeat mistakes and improve their TTPs. The more countries train, exercise, and conduct operations with other countries, evaluate lessons learned, and implement changes, the more operationally effective they become during combat.

The most important aspect of combined operations is the command and control (C2) elements that direct forces, as well as the C2 elements that coordinate and synchronize between the countries involved. For example, during NATO’s Operation Allied Force in 1999, NATO planned and conducted operations against the Yugoslav government of President Slobodan Milosevic to force him to the negotiating table. In practice, 19 countries had to agree on every target selected for an attack: “Target lists, weapons used, and forces deployed were all subject to prior approval by all NATO governments. This slowed decision-making, constrained operations, and sometimes emphasized political over military considerations,” according to a Congressional Research Service report. The NATO allies learned that “command by committee” was not the best way to conduct a military campaign and is used as an example of what not to do.

Final Thoughts

In the case of the United States and Taiwan, I hope this planning, training, and exercise process has already begun to deter the CCP from conducting any aggressive action against Taiwan. At the same time, the combined training and exercises increase Taiwan’s military capabilities to be more lethal and resist aggression by the CCP’s PLA. Based on this, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and other Taiwan-friendly countries could participate in these combined exercises and training to ensure the Taiwan Strait continues to be peaceful.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.