A nation must think before it acts.
FPRI’s Shelley Rigger Featured on USNI News
Taiwan, faced with a more aggressive China, is talking a good game of ramping up the island’s security with its own submarines, buying sophisticated fighter aircraft and exploring asymmetric defenses, but President Tsai Ing-wen’s administration has not made the hard choices to raise a defense budget that already is being consumed by higher personnel costs, an expert panel agreed on Wednesday.
“It’s a judgment call” on how much to spend on security and how to spend it, Ryan Hass, a fellow at the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at the John L. Thornton China Center said at the event at the Brookings Institution. But as a percentage of a flat-lined defense budget with an increasing personnel topline, “this is where the questions of submarines, F-35s comes up” for future defense needs are going unmet.