Taiwan’s Will to Defend Itself and Prepare for a Chinese Invasion

Um, on Taiwan, um, I know you talked with Senator Shaheen about their defense budget.

There's also the question, um, about national resolve.

What's your, I mean, that's a hard thing to judge and it's, it's more a question of political

judgment and statecraft than it is military matters, but what's your sense as a career

military man of Taiwan and, and their willingness to go to the mattresses to defend their nation?

Uh, I have a great deal of faith in Taiwan's military age populations, willingness, capability

and will to defend themselves, orders of magnitude above others.

I was going to ask you to name the others, but I guess that would be in politics.

So I won't ask you to do that.

Well, what I'll say is that, uh, Ukraine demonstrated relatively low numbers in polling pre-conflict

and they've responded as admirably, as admirably as a society can.

Taiwan's polling is orders of magnitude above that, leading me to positively assert their

willingness to defend themselves.

Just common sense.

Like you don't have to have access to that kind of data.

Just, I think common sense would say if you're sitting in Taiwan and you're a mom or dad

and you're worried about your son's or daughter's future, grandma or grandpa, and you look at

what communist China has done and say Macau and Hong Kong, um, once they gained control

of those territories, you wouldn't want them to gain control of your territory.

Is that correct?

Yes, sir.

Does the military have full and proper focus on that threat?

Um, you know, for us, we're a globe spanning superpower and Bob Gates once testified in

this committee after he had left the department and was probably a bit more free to speak

that we have a perfect, almost perfect record of predicting our next war, uh, since Vietnam.

We gotten it wrong every single time, whether it was Grenada or Panama or Iraq, the first

or second time or the Balkans, Ukraine, what have you.

That's why our military plans for so many different contingencies.

While we have guys up in Arctic warfare school or in jungle warfare school or in desert warfare

school.

Obviously, if you're Taiwan's military from the time you raise your hand to enlist as

a private to the time you're the chief of defense, there is one and only one military

contingency that you should be thinking about and planning for it.

Does their military have that kind of single minded focus in your assessment?

I do see that in their military and I think that they're working really hard, uh, and

I'm seeing success in their, uh, in their building the kind of operational concepts

that will lead for them to be successful in thwarting an invasion.