As Chinese military capabilities race forward, they buy time to take Taiwan by force with capabilities that force American fleet and air units to approach Taiwan more cautiously. The days when anything over the horizon from the Chinese mainland was terra incognita for the PLA are long gone. We are working hard to make sure that we can project power closer to Taiwan in the early days of a war with China, even if it isn't with assets we would have used even fifteen years ago, but more and more we rely on Taiwan to buy us the time we need to organize forces to penetrate the expanding area of influence the Chinese are spreading over the western Pacific.
And Taiwan is falling down on this job:
Taiwan's defense budget has fallen over the past three years, from US$10.4 billion in 2008, to US$9.6 billion in 2009, and US$9.3 billion in 2010.
The NT$297.2 billion budget for 2011 (equal to US$9.2 billion when figured at the NT$32.3 per U.S. dollar exchange rate in place when the budget was drawn up last year) represents only 2.2 percent of Taiwan's estimated NT$13.73 trillion GDP.
Even when the MND adds spending that is not directly tied to military functions, such as social welfare and housing subsidies for veterans and their dependents, the "broad" defense budget of NT$374.8 billion is 2.73 percent of estimated GDP, still short of the target.
Though the budget for 2011 has already been approved, Shuai Hua-min, a KMT legislator and the co-convener of the Foreign and National Defense Affairs Committee, said bluntly on Monday that the MND's 2012 budget would be rejected if it were less than 3 percent of GDP.
It's all well and good for the Taiwanese government to say they won't engage in an arms race with China, but China has been running pretty fast for the last decade or two without even thinking about whether Taiwan will deign to compete.
