Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: 行政院海岸巡防署
DURING A SERIES of drills held for National Oceans Day in Kaohsiung, President Lai Ching-te called for the passage of a 410 billion NT special budget for the Coast Guard.
Specifically, Lai highlighted Chinese grey-zone tactics as to why the special budget should be passed. The special budget includes funding for the construction of new vessels, the acquisition of drones, special training for members of the Coast Guard, and surveillance equipment.
Surveillance equipment would likely be with the aim of ensuring greater situational awareness, when there have been incidents in past years, including Chinese nationals landing on Taiwan after making illegal crossings on small vessels, as well as the suspected cutting of submarine cables by Chinese vessels. Drones, too, would be used for surveillance purposes, though one notes more broadly that Taiwan has placed greater emphasis on drones as part of efforts to reorient the military toward asymmetric defense aimed at coping with a larger adversary such as China.
Funding for such initiatives was jeopardized by the KMT’s cuts to the budget earlier this year. For example, the budget for a drone facility in Chiayi was among what was cut, along with funding for the repair of submarine cables under the Ministry of Digital Affairs. The cuts led to warnings that Taiwan would face difficulty paying shipbuilders for navy and coast guard vessels.
At the same time, the framing of how Lai made the announcement is notable. The drills simulated rescue operations, interception, as well as the Coast Guard boarding a vessel that had been captured by “international terrorists.” The attempt was to signal the importance of the Coast Guard for more than simply combating Chinese grey-zone tactics, but for a number of situations that Taiwanese vessels might face–for example, piracy. This is not too different from how civil defense efforts in Taiwan have often emphasized that skills gained through civil defense training would be useful in the event of other calamities to befall Taiwan, such as natural disasters.
Apart from that the Coast Guard may play a greater role, with the increase in Chinese grey-zone tactics directed toward Taiwan in past years, the Coast Guard may be called on as a means of avoiding escalation with China. When China sought to use a collision between a Coast Guard vessel and a Chinese fishing ship intruding in Kinmen territorial waters that led to the death of two Chinese nationals when the ship attempted to flee, crashing into the Coast Guard vessel, the Taiwanese government emphasized that it did not intend to increase naval activity in the region. Rather, the Coast Guard would continue to be called on to carry on monitoring duties.
In order to avoid how China sought to use the incident to justify an increase in military activity and grey-zone activity, the Coast Guard stated that it would order thousands of body cameras to use in the future, so as to prevent opacity, allowing for China to have pretexts for escalation. In a similar vein, the Coast Guard stated that it would take 6,000 civilian volunteers on its missions in the future, so as to provide for greater transparency.
It can generally be assumed that the Coast Guard will continue to try and avoid situations that might give China a pretext to escalate. At the same time, given that grey-zone tactics by China take place and will likely continue to occur, it is still unclear as to how the Coast Guard can take action to curb grey-zone tactics in a way that will avoid escalation.
To this extent, it is to be questioned as to how the KMT will react to such calls from Lai. The KMT may suggest that increasing the budget for the Coast Guard can already be read as provoking China, as it has sometimes framed increasing Taiwan’s defense budget. It is possible that Lai hopes to disentangle the matter of the Coast Guard’s budget from the issue of Taiwan’s defense budget, but it is equally possible that the KMT will link the two issues, as part of its broader efforts to suggest that the DPP is unnecessarily provoking China with its actions.