Defense News

The Ministry of National Defense made the following statements on September 30 regarding resumption of compulsory service and conscription of female personnel.

1. The military currently recruits its manpower through both conscription and voluntary enlistment. The purpose of the latter is to establish modern armed forces of moderate size, professional orientation and excellent combat readiness by deriving voluntary military manpower that is characterized by long-term service propensity, strong commitment and rich experience. While the Constitution of the Republic of China requires that men be drafted for compulsory military service, we still recruit conscripts for 4-month military training, following which they will be placed in reserve forces. This system serves the objective of spending less in preparation for a rainy day.

2. Since the introduction of voluntary enlistment, the advantage of “lean” military has been protruded in terms of training results, training cost, discipline and manpower allocation. The armed forces have been professionally trained to keep their remarkable readiness to respond to threat. As of the end of 2020, the military manpower fulfillment will reach the target of 90%, which satisfy our requirements. The overall combat readiness has been increasingly promoted to effectively perform military maneuvers and disaster relief.

3. Thanks to the voluntary enlistment, female active duty members have surged these years, with a total of number of 25,000, accounting for 13.57%. Looking up to some developed countries that have adopted voluntary enlistment, e.g. the US and France, whose female personnel take up to 15%, the military of the Republic of China will continue to look forward to addition of female human resources. Currently female members exist in practically every unit except submarines, which excludes females due to space limit. Female active duty members are present in branches contributing their expertise to combat and backup functions such as infantry, artillery, equipment, chemistry, engineering, communication, warships, marine corps, aviation, air defense, supply, transportation, health. These female troopers have proven their value with outstanding commitment and performance. The MND welcomes and encourages more females to sign up for enlistment and will keep preparing more female military members for future leaders

4. Those who are conscripted on an annual basis for 4-month fundamental military training total more than NT$80,000, which is more than minimum demand for annual reserve manpower—65,000. Based on the current military training capacity, those graduating straight from college will need to wait until at least the first half of the following year to be conscripted and finish their service. Given sufficient conscripted and reserve manpower, whether or not to resume compulsory service and to draft females still are issues that need to be addressed based on discretion of youth career development, diversity of social perspectives, capacity of military training, technology development and manpower structure. Thanks to government support, the military has been adopting both conscription for basic military training and voluntary enlistment in parallel, which has effectively boosted our readiness. We are deep strong confidence that we can fight for the country whenever we need to. Support and input from the public would be greatly appreciated.