Overview
- Taiwan launched the Han Kuang exercises on Aug. 5, beginning a 10-day, island-wide programme of live-fire, resilience and mobilisation drills that run through Aug. 14.
- For the first time the drills deliberately slow mobile internet to test how civilians and officials communicate during bandwidth shortages and will include short regional slowdowns during air-raid exercises.
- Military planners introduced a U.S.-style backbrief method to improve decentralised command and will mobilise more than 20,000 troops including several thousand reservists to test rapid call-up and frontline decision making.
- President Lai Ching-te and senior officials were moved by armoured personnel carrier to an underground command centre as a public rehearsal of continuity-of-government procedures.
- Exercises focus on practical resilience measures such as wartime relocation of an arsenal, mobilisation of civilian factories, bridge-blocking operations and naval escort drills, and they highlight closer U.S. influence on tactics while leaving questions over Taiwan’s defence budget and pending U.S. arms approvals.