US set to announce military aid for Taiwan
28 July 2023, 22:24
The package includes air defence systems, intelligence and surveillance capabilities, firearms and missiles, officials said.
The US is set to announce 345 million dollars (£268m) in military aid for Taiwan, officials said.
It would be the Biden administration’s first major package drawing on America’s own stockpiles under a new policy intended to speed up military aid to help Taiwan counter China.
The package includes man-portable air defence systems, or Manpads, intelligence and surveillance capabilities, firearms and missiles, according to the unnamed officials.
US lawmakers have been pressuring the Pentagon and White House to speed up the export of weapons to Taiwan to help it counter China.
The aid is part of a presidential authority approved by Congress last year to draw weapons from US military stockpiles to support Taiwan. This gets weapons delivered faster than providing funding for new weapons.
The Pentagon has used a similar authority to get billions of dollars worth of munitions to Ukraine.
Taiwan split from China in 1949 amid civil war. Chinese president Xi Jinping maintains China’s right to take over the now self-ruled island, by force if necessary.
Getting stockpiles of weapons to Taiwan now, before an attack begins, is one of the lessons the US has learned from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Pentagon deputy defence secretary Kathleen Hicks told The Associated Press earlier this year.
Ukraine “was more of a cold-start approach than the planned approach we have been working on for Taiwan, and we will apply those lessons”, Ms Hicks said.
Efforts to resupply Taiwan after a conflict erupted would be complicated because it is an island, she said.
China has accused the US of turning Taiwan into a “powder keg” through the billions of dollars in weapons sales it has pledged.
The US maintains a “One China” policy under which it does not recognise Taiwan’s formal independence and has no formal diplomatic relations with the island in deference to Beijing.
However, US law requires a credible defence for Taiwan and for the US to treat all threats to the island as matters of “grave concern”.
China regularly sends warships and planes across the centre line in the Taiwan Strait that provides a buffer between the sides, as well as into Taiwan’s air defence identification zone, in an effort to intimidate the island’s 23 million people and wear down its military capabilities.
