Taiwan’s semi-official Central News Agency has reported that the country has welcomed 200 military advisers from the United States to sites throughout Taiwan in order to implement ongoing reforms to the island’s armed services.
According to CNA, the instructors were deployed to support training at boot camps and reserve units before Taiwan’s mandatory military service is set to increase from four to twelve months starting in 2024.
Late last year, as Taipei took significant steps to prepare itself for Beijing’s military ambitions in the ensuing ten years, President Tsai Ing-wen declared the change in policy.
Despite having been in power for seven decades, China’s Communist Party authorities have not yet taken control of the island that it claims as part of its territory.
China has resisted continued U.S.-Taiwan defence relations and reacts forcefully to any political support for the island that would jeopardise Beijing’s position since Washington moved official diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.
In October 2021, Tsai, whose second term as president ends in May 2019, admitted for the first time the existence of American military advisers in Taiwan, but said that their numbers weren’t “as many as people thought.”
Her defence minister, Chiu Kuo-cheng, stated shortly after that military exchanges between the United States and Taiwan did not indicate that American forces were currently “stationed in Taiwan.”
More than half of the island’s active service members are soldiers in Taiwan’s army, reports said.
Without going into any detail, Taiwan’s Defense Ministry spokesperson Sun Li-fang stated at a press conference the same day that it “welcomes allied military training to enhance the nation’s armed forces.”
The Wall Street Journal and Reuters reported separately in February that the U.S. Department of Defense intended to send between 100 and 200 troops to Taiwan in the coming months, the largest such deployment in almost fifty years.