2023-07-28 12:50:19
The red soldiers advance without resistance after taking the beach in helicopters and amphibious vehicles. Suddenly, the noise breaks. Tanks and various armored hulks emerge from the dunes, the blue troops erect barricades and dig ditches to hinder the enemy advance, launch smoke grenades and other explosives… Twenty minutes later everything is over, the invaders have been repelled and the Taiwanese flag flutters on the sand.
It’s a simulacrum in one of the few twenty beaches on the island that allow a Normandy-style landing and it is part of the ‘Han Kuang’ maneuvers with which Taiwan oils its defense this week in different invasion scenarios. He has practiced them without exception for four decades amid media pasotism but that The alleged risk of war that has been aired in recent times has brought them out of hiding. Observers highlight a change in magnitude and realism of maneuverswhich have gone from operatic performance to surgical rehearsal against attack scenarios.
In this transit, they have added new exercises for protect critical infrastructure As the airport and the communication nodes. At the Taoyuan airport, the main airport on the island, the reds fought for half an hour on Tuesday against the blues in the sky and the runways with the same result on the beach. The inspiration, Taipei has acknowledged, came from the Russian attack on the kyiv airport at the start of the war that Ukrainian troops repelled. Moscow relied on control of that infrastructure to send assault forces without pause and settle the conflict quickly.
Open sea routes
Another exercise consists of open sea routes before a presumed blockade. This blockade, by sea and air, was tested by the People’s Liberation Army to make Taipei understand his anger at the visit to the island of the Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi. The island’s Army has fine-tuned its cooperation with firefighters, police and the civilian population throughout the week.
On the island these days you hear the anti-aircraft alarms that start the races to the shelters. It consists, clarified the president, Tsai Ing-wen, in involving everyone: “We need to start from the concept of a complete defense society to integrate and use the resources of the Army, the central government, local governments and the civil sectors, and coordinate all units to work together,” he said this week. Tsai has been seen in all editions of the maneuvers as her second term expires, often in the green military uniform.
Los Taiwanese show less fervor than their president for the routine war games. The Chinese also leave them cold: after the maneuvers that followed the visit of Hairythe largest in history and presented in much of the global press as the corollary of an imminent and inevitable invasion, 78% of Taiwanese revealed in a survey that they did not feel worried.
deterrent effect
From the Government, on the other hand, they consider essential the deterrent effect of the maneuvers. I clarified it in May on Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng: “There are two types of people who are always attentive to our work; the people of Taiwan, for whom we train tirelessly to protect, and the enemies, for whom we work tirelessly to defeat. If we do our job well, the first they will continue smiling; if we fail to comply with our duties, the latter will have a free hand”.
Las tensions in the Strait of Formosa when in taiwan rules the Democratic Progressive Party they are taken for granted. Sino-American relations, on the other hand, are enjoying a timid thaw after the pilgrimage to Beijing by various senior White House officials. Its end seems imminent: Washington will shortly announce another arms sale to Taipei worth more than 300 million dollars, according to the Reuters agency.
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