PRESS

Even so, the QDR describes a force that can contend
with PLA forces in the air, at sea, on the ground, and
in the cyber and electronic domains.
Enabling all activities in the future will be effective
joint command, control, communication, computers,
and ISR. According to the QDR, the military “must
strengthen battlespace management, command, control,
intelligence and early warning capabilities to accurately
monitor enemy activities and flexibly execute
force maneuver.” 20
What Taiwan requires, in short, is a highly skilled,
innovative, high-tech force. But it is questionable
whether Taiwan can successfully create this defense
force, given resource and manpower constraints and
shortcomings in U.S.-Taiwan defense cooperation.
SHIFTING FORCE STRUCTURE
Over the past 15 years, Taiwan has been shifting
to a smaller, more high-tech force. In 1999, its armed
forces consisted of 370,000 active duty members; that
number dropped to 290,000 in the first half of the last
decade. While Taiwan’s military has pursued modernization
across all three services, the largest forcestructure
changes have occured in the navy.
On the whole, the fleet has shrunk, both in numbers
of ships and in average ship size. At the beginning of
the century, Taiwan’s navy had a traditional surfacewarfare
emphasis. The fleet included 12 destroyers,
which constituted more than a third of Taiwan’s principal
surface combatants.
Since that time, the navy has retired all of those
ships, replacing them with just four Keelung-class destroyers.
The Keelungs, former American Kidd-class
destroyers, are the largest warships the ROC Navy
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