Nat’l Defense Black Hole, Electoral Wild Beast

 Nat’l Defense Black Hole, Electoral Wild Beast

China Times Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

November 10, 2019

 Translation of an Excerpt

President Tsai Ing-wen some days ago inspected and attended a workshop of armed forces reserve officers, and later took part in the ground-breaking ceremony of the Veterans General Hospital Pingtung Branch. For a president to preside at a reserve officers meeting and an event related to veterans activities, there is nothing wrong, but at the sensitive moment of electoral campaign, allowing general officers on active duty to change into plain clothes and accompany her, deliberately showing their faces on the same stage with Green camp legislative candidates not only makes the commander in chief of the Armed Forces dip a strong flavor of politics and makes the Armed Forces that should have strictly observed political neutrality blatantly get involved in the electoral campaign. This once again highlighted that the DPP would use all means to win the elections.

In the more than three years since the DPP came to power, a number of governance performances in national defense have been contaminated by political calculations, and the legal system has been undermined, making investments in military building, which have an extremely high degree of professionalism, filled with disputes, eliciting doubts and misgivings everywhere, while chaotic military building thinking leaves national defense constructions mired in disorder.

The DPP government has actively injected itself into research development and production of ordnance, even chanting slogans such as "locally-manufactured submarines" and "locally-manufactured military aircraft", engaging in political operations without any inhibitions The whole process of planning and public tender of the design in the project of locally-manufactured submarines is full of questions, eliciting disputes in society everywhere. Furthermore, because whether we could secure export permits for sensitive equipment has been questioned by a number of ordnance experts. Similarly, with respect to the selection process for the type of advanced jet fighter trainers conforms to the combat needs of the users in the future, it has been filled with a cacophony of dissent, but once the ten-gallon hat of national defense confidentiality been donned, the black hole becomes deep without bottom.

Especially, the downstream industrial network complementing the research and construction of ordnance has become the tool of political maneuverings and electoral operations of the Green camp. When questioned by external circles, the government would respond with “top secret”, attempting to suppress concerns and discussions of the society in order to facilitate black hole manipulations. However, when the Green camp must use this to canvass votes, it would hit the guns and beat the drums, promoting propaganda to the voters in a high pitch, ostensibly using it as a tool to canvass votes for the elections.

In over three years in the past, the Green camp’s governance performance in national defense has demonstrated black hole operations everywhere, with chaotic thinking in holistic military building and disorder in national defense construction. To let an orderly and disciplined national defense military building see blue skies, or allowing the Green camp to continue shielding the skies single-handedly, it entirely depends on the ballots in the hands of our countrymen to make a decision!

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