Asia-Pacific

Analysis: Taiwan and the Leaked Pentagon Overmatch Brief

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By Howard Chang/Lery Hiciano

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TaiwanPlus speaks to defense expert Guermantes Lailari about his take on the leaked report citing the Pentagon's Overmatch Brief assessing US weaknesses in a conflict against China, and his thoughts on the evolving balance of power in East Asia.

REPORTER:  

The report highlights several vulnerabilities that US forces would face if they were to fight China. Do you think there are any that are particularly pressing that the US and Taiwan should be focused on?

 

Guermantes Lailari (VISITING RESEARCH FELLOW, INDSR):  

The real area that I believe needs attention is the area of Taiwan's reserve forces. Officially, Taiwan has 2 million reservists, or people eligible for reserve call up, but only about 100,000 are trained. Which is a problem, and the training is only two weeks. So there's two things I would strongly recommend.

 

So Taiwan, if Taiwan had its 2 million reservists trained, it would make a significant difference because China would have a major headache if every reservist was trained.

 

REPORTER:  

Of these concerns raised in this report, are there any that you think Taiwan US collaboration would be particularly effective at answering or dealing with?

 

Guermantes Lailari (VISITING RESEARCH FELLOW, INDSR):  

The budget that Lai President Lai suggests is a budget that will have a part of it that's integrated air defense, so-called dome or Taiwan dome a layered air and missile defense system.

 

Israel has a layered tiered missile defense system. So hopefully Taiwan the United States and Israel will talk about how important it is to have this kind of a defense system that will protect Taiwan from ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, short range missiles, because some of those rockets might be fired from ships at sea close to Taiwan's coast.

 

REPORTER:  

What does the timing of the report's release indicate to you, given all the tensions ongoing in the region right now between China, Taiwan, the US and even Japan?

 

Guermantes Lailari (VISITING RESEARCH FELLOW, INDSR):  

Assessments are good up to a point. But and they're used to sort of energize the system in terms of getting Aware and focused on the problem and trying to deal with it. So it's a good thing. But don't assume that the outcome is going to be predetermined

 

Should China assert itself in the kinetic domain. So that includes not only the US and Taiwan, but Japan, the Philippines, Australia, many countries are threatened by China's action. And, you know, the Chinese navy is larger than the US Navy. The the Chinese Coast Guard is the largest in the world, etc., etc.. So China is not building its it's maritime fleet to watch whales jump out of the water. They're there. They're designing it for world domination, I'm sorry to say, but that's that's a fact. And so the nations of the Indo-Pacific need to deal with it.