Shownotes Transcript
How would that jive with what Trump has said about Taiwan should be paying the U.S. for protection? Well, I think that there's a real is who who knows what the reason why he said that. OK, so we don't really know. But there is there is a there is a feeling that Taiwan needs to be doing more for its own self-defense.
And I laid that out in my article as well. Right now, it's spending about 2.45 percent of its GDP on the defense. And, you know, Poland is going up to 5 percent, 4 or 5 percent of its GDP. Several other countries in Europe are going up upward because of the Russian threat.
Japan is going to be at 2% in the next few years. So they're trying to argue that here in Taiwan, that they're doing more than most of the other Asian countries. But again, going back to Israel, Israel has been spending 5% of its GDP for the last 40 plus years on its defense. So there's an expectation in Washington that Taiwan should be closer to the 5%. President Trump has said 10%.
Elbridge Colby has also referenced 5% to 10% as well. So that's part of the reason why I think there's a push to get Taiwan to invest more in its defense, not only in weapons systems, but also in training its people. In my opinion, there's a lot more training that should be done for its reservists, for example. The 1.6 million reservists, only about 10% actually get any training after they finish their training.
As I understand, there's a lot of resistance to increasing the amount of training required. Why is that? Okay. So I think that was a comment that was made maybe a few years ago when the training, the one week training, which was going on, was not worthy of the time that they would participate in. But I think the intervention of the United States military in their training
active duty and the reserve training has dramatically changed the quality and the, uh, and the, uh, let's say, uh, the impact of the training. So, uh, the two week training, for example, has a lot more, um, attempts to, uh, train groups of military personnel instead of just focusing on, let's say, uh, shooting or, uh, you know, basic, uh, review of their skills. Um,
I think that as more and more of the training becomes more tactically oriented and a better quality, a lot of the Taiwanese people I spoke to who went through it are saying that it has improved since, let's say, a few years ago.
And that includes conscription training as well. And then of course, there's the active force, the force that's volunteer, the 180,000 volunteers like we have in the United States, we have a volunteer force as well. Those folks are the ones who are really on the front line.
because they're committed to a lifelong service for the defense of Taiwan. So I think in general, if you ask anyone who's in any of those different military categories, that they will say that everything is getting better. Now, the question is whether it's getting better fast enough,
I don't know. I do know that it was President Trump who approved lethal training to the Ukrainians in 2017, whereas the previous administration under Obama refused to permit the United States military from training the Ukrainians in lethal force. So I think that with Trump back,
I think that we'll see a lot more emphasis on getting more training, more numbers, and more weapons to Taiwan, especially in the asymmetric arena, anti-ship, anti-air, anti-tank, all these sort of systems that were used a lot in Ukraine, because I think probably the notion that
Taiwan probably has enough of the more expensive weapon systems. And now they want sort of systems that are dispersed and tactical and hard to target and that will be able to sustain themselves. If a war happens, they'll be able to use them and make the PLAs more
suffer as much as possible from any kind of attack on Taiwan.
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