Early this summer, 19 former senior U.S., Japanese and Taiwanese officers took part in the highly detailed Taiwan Defense TTX 2025 war game, which indicated systemic vulnerabilities in Taiwan’s rules of engagement and the defense of its east coast and outlying islands. On the first day of the two-day exercise, the Chinese team seized the Taiwan-held Pratas Island, blockaded Taiwan’s main island, sank a Taiwanese coast guard vessel and fired hypersonic ballistic missiles east of Midway Island. Panic ensued as people tried to flee Taiwan.
The overwhelmed Taiwanese team acted as if it were in a game that it could deescalate out of. It held a press conference to condemn China for its actions and did not attempt to retake Pratas. This prompted an exasperated Lee Hsi-min (李喜明), a retired Republic of China Navy admiral and member of the control team, to require the Taiwan team to redo the last move of day one. “The Taiwan team,” he said, “should go home tonight and think about how to respond.” The exercise ended the next day with an “all-out battle on the island,” after the PLA captured the strategically vital outlying island of Penghu and the cities of Hualien, Taitung and Yilan on Taiwan’s east coast.
Last week the Taipei School of Economics and Political Science and Center for Peace and Security, two of the NGOs that ran the war game, published the results of the war game and issued six recommendations which they said required urgent government attention. The first is that, in response to the Chinese Communist Party’s gray zone threats, the government must establish response guidelines and rules of engagement. Second, the possibility of the PLA transitioning from “exercises to surprise attacks” cannot be ruled out.
Third, the risk of a complete blockade of Taiwan’s outlying islands demands serious attention, and the government should establish a crisis response mechanism. Based on analysis of the war game, Taiwan’s current troop deployments and readiness levels make it challenging to defend every island. Beyond the principle of “independent defense,” the government and Ministry of Defense lack clear engagement rules and innovative strategies for the long-range reinforcement of Taiwan’s outlying islands.
Fourth, in scenarios involving potential PLA quarantines or blockades, Taiwan’s government should incorporate allied support and regularly conduct joint exercises with the navy and coast guard. Fifth, the military’s eastward relocation strategy should be reevaluated, and consideration should be given to integrating allied support to help secure this region. Sixth, Taiwan’s eastern region is no longer a “strategic barrier” (戰略屏障), and consideration should be given to establishing effective countermeasures to resist sudden attacks on the east coast.
Taiwan’s east coast has traditionally been seen as more secure because missiles fired from China couldn’t easily target Taiwanese bases on the other side of the Central Mountain Range, Chinese planes would have to overfly Taiwan’s more heavily defended western airspace, and Chinese ships would have to go around the north or south of the island to reach beaches there. But now the Chinese navy and air force are already drilling in waters to the east of Taiwan, challenging if not destroying old assumptions.
At a press conference last Friday announcing the results of the war game, Alexander Huang (黃介正), the Chairman at Council on Strategic & Wargaming Studies and Director of International Affairs of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) noted that for three years, the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese coast guard and China’s maritime militia have conducted coordinated gray zone incursions in the air and sea around Taiwan, Penghu and the outlying islands. However, the government still lacks clear operational guidelines, and the Ministry of Defense and various military units have no clear rules for engaging with non-wartime gray zone provocations. Huang said this creates significant uncertainty and pressure for frontline troops.
“When planning the design, the attacking forces focused primarily on capturing Penghu and striking Taiwan’s east coast. The main reason is that we aimed to challenge our existing conventional assumptions, as the eastern defenses are undeniably very weak,” said Huang.
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