Taiwan’s largest and longest-ever annual military drills kicked off on Wednesday with a simulation of mainland Chinese grey-zone tactics as the opening move in a round-the-clock war game designed to reflect a realistic and protracted cross-strait conflict scenario.
The 41st edition of the Han Kuang Exercise marks a significant departure from previous years, both in scale and duration. Doubled in length to 10 days, this year’s drills are being conducted without scripts or fixed timelines to mimic battlefield unpredictability, according to Taiwan’s defence ministry.
Ministry officials said the change reflected an increasingly volatile threat environment, especially amid stepped-up pressure from mainland China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
In response to “separatist” moves by Taiwanese leader William Lai Ching-te, the PLA has amplified military pressure on the self-governed island over the past year, including ramping up joint combat patrols, naval and amphibious assault training across the Taiwan Strait, and near-daily fly-bys into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone (ADIZ).
“This is the most intensive Han Kuang ever conducted,” Major General Tung Chi-hsing, head of the defence ministry’s joint operation planning division, said last week. He said the training was focused not just on a single attack, but on “a drawn-out war that played out in stages – on beaches, in cities and across society”.
