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The 42nd Han Kuang Exercises represent a significant improvement over previous iterations of Taiwan's most important military drills. It was longer, more realistic, less scripted and, crucially, placed much greater emphasis on the whole-of-society dimension of Taiwan's defense. That included closer coordination between the military and civilian authorities, and a greater effort to test how government agencies, local authorities, infrastructure providers and the public would operate alongside the armed forces during a crisis. A conflict over Taiwan would test the resilience of the entire society, not just the effectiveness of its military. There were important operational improvements as well. The deeper integration of the Coast Guard Administration was among the most significant. It reflects the reality that a confrontation is unlikely to begin with a neat transition from peace to conventional war. Taiwan will have to operate across the "gray zone" and military domains simultaneously, making effective coordination between the coast guard and the armed forces essential. The 42nd Han Kuang Exercises also demonstrated more layered integration of drones, greater attention to preserving command-and-control continuity under disruption and a more realistic approach to "gray zone" scenarios. The increase in use of decentralized command and off-script scenarios was particularly welcome. Exercises should not be choreographed demonstrations designed to show that everything works. Their purpose is to discover what does not. For the same reason, there should not be too much fuss about every incident or accident. An F-16 incident in Chiayi and artillery shells that rolled from a civilian truck onto a road in Miaoli County naturally attracted attention. Such incidents should be investigated and lessons learned, but accidents and mistakes are inevitable when thousands of people, military equipment and civilian infrastructure are involved in large exercises. The important questions are why something went wrong, how the system responded and whether the problem was fixed. Exercises in which nothing goes wrong might simply be because they are not demanding enough. However, this year's exercises should be a stepping stone rather than an endpoint. The reserve system is a good example. Taiwan needs to train a lot more reservists. The stresses involved in mobilizing, processing, equipping, transporting and integrating large numbers of personnel cannot be replicated with small groups. Scale is only one part of the problem. The other is surprise. Off-script scenarios are useful, but everyone still knows that the Han Kuang exercises are taking place. Taiwan needs to test parts of the mobilization system under genuinely no-notice conditions. At a minimum, the initial stages, including communications, notification, reporting, processing, equipment issuance and transportation, should sometimes be tested without those involved knowing in advance when the test will occur. Taiwan needs to know what happens in the first hours of a crisis when people have not had days or weeks to prepare. Another concern is whether deficiencies identified during exercises are actually corrected. Civil defense shelters are an obvious example. Their shortcomings have been known for years, yet progress on accessibility, identification, maintenance and usability has been limited. Finding the same problems repeatedly is not enough. Exercises need to be followed by clear responsibility for fixing deficiencies, deadlines for doing so and testing to establish whether the flaws have been addressed. There are also too many bottlenecks in decisionmaking. Wartime communications will be disrupted and senior decisionmakers might be unavailable. Lower-level military commanders and civilian officials need greater authority to act independently. This is partly procedural, but fundamentally it is cultural. Organizations need to tolerate reasonable mistakes by subordinates rather than incentivizing a wait-for-instructions mentality. Taiwan still needs to pay greater attention to basic soldier professionalism. This is hardly a new concern. Questions about training standards, discipline, weapons handling and basic soldiering skills have surfaced repeatedly. Some publicly released photographs from this year's exercises again raise questions about basic rifle handling and tactical discipline. Individual photographs can be misleading and should not be used to judge an entire force, but there is an uncomfortable counterpoint. If some of them were planned photographs — taken when soldiers knew they were being observed — poor fundamentals become more concerning, not less. If basic standards are visibly lacking under controlled conditions, the situation under fatigue, confusion and genuine combat pressure could be considerably worse. Taiwan should not want the Han Kuang drills to run smoothly. It should want them to expose where systems break and then demonstrate the following year that the weaknesses have been fixed. Mor Sobol is an associate professor in Tamkang University's Department of Diplomacy and International Relations.
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