And so most people wasting half a year or more just waiting?
How could it come to that?!
Is this the result of failing to create an all volunteer force plus reducing conscription time to only 4 months?
“Regarding this, the Military Service Bureau explained that because the national army has insufficient manpower, it cannot take care of so many recruits at once.”
Full article in Mandarin
thats quite a stupid excuse.
It does not sound stupid at all to me.
There are ways to solve this problem, within a relatively reasonable time frame.
I find it hard to believe that a country where every year there are less and less able bodied men capable of military service has “too many recruits to handle”.
For example, If there are too many recruits at a given time, space out the enlisting dates: open a new chorot of basic training every 2 or 3 months and have less recruits in each cohort. Another idea will be to pull out active duty personnel and train them to be instructors, a 3 month long training course in how to be a drill sergeant should suffice (thats how long it is in my home country’s army), and you have enough instructors for the new cohorts coming in.
what i find even more hard to believe, is that the army, instead of actively solving the problem resorts to this type of “mei ban fa” excuses.
Im no expert, but my experience in Taiwan has taught me that in 80% of the time there is a ban fa, its just an excuse not to do anything.
I am not an expert, but that sounds too optimistic to me.
I for one am glad to hear the military is saying they are short on qualified personnel instead of taking the usual cha-bu-duo approach and having people come in and spin their wheels.
I am not glad about it at all. I see it more as a motivation issue than actual obstacles.
The army must have a “can do” attiude, an army doesn’t have a chance to fail and try again. They need to succeed in what they do. If god forbid there is an earthquake, will the army say “sorry, not enough soldiers to help”? If there is war → “sorry, not enough men to fight”?
I agree with you that things can’t be solved in 3 month long training course, you need to factor in extra time for planning, training the trainers (the people who will teach people how to be drill instructors), make sure you have capacity in the barracks etc. But we are not building an army from scratch, a part of this infrastructure should already be exsiting in the armed forces.
President Tsai has done a good job in boosting the armed forces, but they defintely need to start working harder and not give out lazy excuses.
in the private sector, when you dont have enough manpower, you work double shifts. But it seems the army is not trying that hard… there are enough things the army can do, excuses is not one of them.
Aren’t there at least two US Marines on this forum ? Job opportunities for you and a Gold card maybe. Just a thought 
That is quite a bit of nonsense. And how do you know they are giving out lazy excuses? They are signaling they are not ready. I would be surprised if they were. An army does not become an elite army if you do not provide them with the necessary funding and resources and a bit of inspiration.
We are not disagreeing over this, my point is this is not the message i want to hear from those who are entrusted with protecting us 
There are US servicemen training Taiwanese troops, an optimistic perspective is they don’t have enough good instructors now but there are some in the pipeline
In that case let us hope the squeaky wheel gets the grease 
I’ve watched Top Gun twenty plus times.
I was thinking more Mad Max, flame throwers on trucks, drones droppung hot burning things etc. Need lots of Toyota pick up trucks.
Taiwan army training is a fucking joke.
I probably fired a grand total of about 120 rounds during my ENTIRE army stay, this is a very liberal estimate by the way. I fired more rounds during one range session in Austin than this.
The fitness training is a fucking joke. We had maybe a week of PT and they didn’t push us particularly hard.
Majority of the time in the army is counting shit, cleaning guns (even though we fired them on average once every 3 months), running errands, and basically sitting around a piece of equipment for no particular reason AT ALL. Maintenance consists of just sitting around wiping dust off the equipment. I can’t count the number of times with a single hand that we did anything significant or useful. Once I was ordered to back up the artillery battalion doing guess what, building fences (and we did that by disassembling an abandoned military kennel and using that as fencing material). The fence quality was shit and I guarantee you the average person can very easily cross it. Another occasion we did disaster relief in the mountains after a typhoon. All we did was go to someone’s backyard where a mountain had partially collapsed and remove debris with a wheel barrow (and there was nowhere to dump the material), and before we even barely begun the task we were recalled. It turns out there are either other more capable units or civilian contractors are far more capable than the military at disaster relief.
I think my takeaway is that our military is trained to raise a white flag when the PLA shows up. Even the E-6’s (and O-3’s at that!!) told me that if the PLA shows up he plans on surrendering after fragging the CO. Say that in the US military and they’ll have you court martialed or at least you get a big chicken dinner.
Unless English Tsai is making any meaningful change in the military (other than buying expensive toy$ from the US military) I don’t see the point to all of this. Most Taiwanese thinks conscription is a waste of time and does nothing to help Taiwan in an invasion. Taiwanese is just far too chickenshit to actually fight for it. I expect a complete surrender if push comes to shove.
You have no idea how fucking corrupt the Taiwan military is. I’m sure my father knows but he won’t say it (because he likely was in on it).
Oh and remember the time when they wanted Taiwan to become a volunteer army (the same reason why conscription got shortened to 4 months)? I was there when the new batch of recruits came in. The training standard was shit, it was literally the same training that we got when we were conscripted. Keep in mind this is volunteer force that is supposed to be professional. A single marine would be able to subdue the entire base easily.
Will it improve once the new 1 year conscripts are cycled part way through?
Say at 9 months a certain amount of them could be used as “assistant instructors”.
But they don’t even start until 2024. Could be almost 2025 by the time that becomes a possibility, especially if there’s still a 6+ month backlog to even start in 2024.
They need to make the military training tougher, more PT, more weapons training, obstacle courses, etc.
None of these exists in the training when I was there.
Remember Typhoon Morakot? 
Once that young man died, the government made it political, wussed out and bowed to crying moms. it was sad, but shouldnt be used as ammo for doing what they did.
Not necessarily, a warehouse clerck or a cook doesnt need to go through 6 months long infantry training. They can do 3 weeks and then continue to their professional training (e.g. how to manage a warehouse, how to be a cook etc.).
I dont know how long the combat basic training is here, in my home country infantry soldiers do 4 months basic training, then an additional 3 months of advanced training. so total 7 months training before they start doing active duty assignments.
Depends on your conemps- ie the marines have a (relatively) small force and post Vietnam started the “every marine a rifleman” ethos of being an adaptive, ready to deploy expeditionary force. I’d suggest Taiwan, with it’s small standing army and potential reliance on a reserve force with limited training absolutely needs to take that approach. when shit hits the fan, even the cook needs to be able to fight.
I dont disagree, its a question of your strategy and how you want to deploy your forces. The issue is that right now the TW army is neither here nor there. everybody goes through the same inadequate training.
you can choose to pay more attention to fighting units and save the time of non-frontline soldiers, or you can choose an “everybody works, everybody fights” approach, but it doesnt seem to me they made this decision, its more of a “everybody wastes time”.