Taiwan's military is starting a new kind of exercise this week, which the defense ministry says is intended to handle emerging gray-zone threats from China.
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00:00Taiwan is starting a new kind of military exercise this week.
00:04What the defense ministry says is to handle emerging threats from China.
00:09Our defense reporter Jaime Ocon has been following developments here in Taipei and joins us live
00:14from our newsroom.
00:15Jaime, can you explain more about these exercises?
00:18That's right.
00:21So the drills do start today and some people are calling them unprecedented.
00:25That's because they're the first of their kind.
00:27Now they don't have an official name, but a rough translation describes these as immediate
00:32combat readiness drills, which will be involving all branches of the military and will last
00:36for five days.
00:38Sources have told us that this kind of exercise will not involve any live fire, but simulates
00:43a situation in which China's gray zone warfare, gray zone activities, turn into an actual
00:48military attack.
00:50So this drill will see military units mobilizing and deploying to various defensive positions.
00:55China has already reacted to the exercises, sending 26 military aircraft as part of a
01:00patrol around waters around Taiwan.
01:04Many people are calling these exercises mini Hong Kong, of course referring to Taiwan's
01:08largest annual military exercises known as the Hong Kong drills, in which Taiwan simulates
01:13an all out attack from China.
01:16And so those exercises actually start at the end of July.
01:19And so one of the main goals of these drills is to get soldiers ready and warmed up for
01:23those larger scale exercises that will happen at the end of the summer.
01:28Jaime, why is this happening now?
01:30Is it a response to anything specific?
01:33No, not anything specific, but it's more of a combination of these gray zone threats that
01:39Taiwan has recently really started to see more of.
01:42Gray zone warfare, that term, it's aggressive actions that are definitely not peaceful,
01:47but it's also not a full act of war.
01:49These activities include suspicious cargo ships sailing around Taiwan, looking for undersea
01:54cables and most recently also psychological warfare.
01:58This morning, an official account from China's Ministry of State Security released the full
02:04names, photos and ID numbers of four individuals within Taiwan's military within the Information
02:10and Electronic Warfare Command.
02:12Now they say that they are henchmen, that they are so-called separatist forces supporting
02:17Taiwan independence.
02:19The Electronic Warfare Command responded to that using the same phrase that the Ministry
02:23of Defense used last time, saying that China is the biggest threat to security in the Indo-Pacific
02:29and that the military here will take any operations necessary in order to protect Taiwan's democracy.
02:34Now I want to go back to the military exercises that we're going to see because back in March,
02:39Taiwan's defense minister told us that one of the top priorities is for Taiwan to handle
02:43the gray zone threat.
02:44So these exercises this week, in which we see Taiwan's military spring into action and
02:49react quickly to these unusual and always not so usually defined threats, the frequency
02:55of these drills is something that I think we're going to see much more of in the future.