A retired admiral from the U.S. Navy made an extraordinary intervention in Taiwan’s political and military debate today, excoriating delays to military preparedness. Mark Montgomery is back in Taiwan, participating in a tabletop wargame that simulates Chinese pressure on Taiwan. In an audience question-and-answer session before the games started, he asked a panel that included senior Taiwanese leaders whether Taiwan is prepared to make the necessary sacrifices needed to reform its military reserves.

"will they make the necessary sacrifices?", asks man from country which just wasted thousands of munitions that were supposed to be used for China

Chen Yeong-kang (陳永康), a sitting Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator, former head of the Taiwanese navy, and the organizer of the wargame, and Alexander Huang (黃介正), the former director of international affairs for the KMT, discussed among other issues the legal challenges to reform. That was when Montgomery fired back from the floor. “You’re fiddling while Rome burns,” he said. Montgomery is no stranger to Taiwan. He participated in the same table top wargame last year and frequently meets with senior leaders, including the president. He was a key contributor to “The Boiling Moat,” a book that laid out a pathway for Taiwan to improve its military position versus China. Montgomery’s question to the panel laid out three challenges that Taiwan faces if it wants to effectively reform the reserves.

1. Can Taiwan find 200,000 citizens who are prepared to sacrifice one weekend a month and two to three weeks each summer for training?
2. Can Taiwanese companies honor and support the people being gone that long without any punishment?
3. Is the Taiwanese army prepared to sacrifice two active duty brigades, freeing up the personnel to train 20 effective reserve brigades?

lol, imagine needing to beg the capitalist class to give your citizenry enough days off to go through military training

isn't the fucking government supposed to support soldiers during training? like, what the hell?

also, what even is this system supposed to be, the reason conscription is usually supposed to happen right after you get out of school (sometimes to be deferred until college) is precisely so you go through it before joining the workforce - because, y'know, flipping the timeline on those around obviously leads to this exact, very-easy-to-predict problem of needing to manage how people's employment is going to be dealt with while they're off spelunking at base

In his answer, Chen raised the issues of Taiwan’s low birth rate not providing enough young men for the reserves, and a problem of the military generally lacking sufficient English capability to operate newly purchased U.S. weapons. Then, he said that Taiwan would need to modify the law to allow more training time. Huang developed the point. To gain time, Taiwan needs to “amend the law, deal with the legal system and deal with the brain cells of politicians.” He added that Taiwan only has one level of reserve mobilization, he said, all-out mobilization. There is no ability to partially mobilize in response to a developing crisis, and companies and government departments are not going to do anything unless legally required. This was when Montgomery raised his hand and delivered his “Fiddling while Rome burns” blow. Finland and Estonia are not talking about esoteric legal issues, he said, they are taking action. He questioned whether Taiwanese children think about military service in the same way that Israelis or Finns do.

There’s only one country prepared to sacrifice its children for your independence, Montgomery said, and it was unclear whether he was addressing the speakers, the room at large or the entirety of Taiwan.

oh get fucked

Then he issued a pretty stark warning: “This is not a party issue. This is a societal issue. And if you don’t attack it aggressively in a bipartisan, together, national way, you’re going to find the one ally you have left is not excited or motivated.” It’s the second time in two weeks that Montgomery has spoken up. At a Future Maritime Defense Symposium at the Legislative Yuan on April 7, he said that U.S President Donald Trump could “collectively punish” Taiwan for not raising defense spending to 5% of GDP in the next few years. He explained that Trump doesn’t care about Taiwanese domestic politics and won’t make allowances for budgets having been blocked by the opposition. “Trump wouldn’t know the DDP [the governing Democratic Progressive Party] from the KMT if his life depended on it,” he said. I asked Montgomery why he seemed a bit punchier on this visit to Taiwan. “It’s one year closer,” he said. Not to 2027 specifically, but one year closer to Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) making a decision to move, perhaps with economic coercion rather than militarily. “The defense budget becoming a political football is completely unacceptable,” he added. Taiwan’s reserves are not in an acceptable state, Montgomery reiterated. “I’m not going to say they’re a joke, but they’re extremely unprepared and unaligned for the mission they need to have.”

Taiwan launched reforms to its reserve system under former President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) that are still being implemented. The conscription period has increased from four months to one year, and there is more training for advanced weapons. But because most conscripts defer their service until after university, they are still under the old regime. Most were still only doing four months last year. It shouldn’t be difficult to amend the rules on mobilization, Huang told me, but the government needs to communicate much better about security to explain to the Taiwanese people. There are lower level changes that can be made by presidential order without bipartisan support, he added. Montgomery sees a lot of work that needs to be done, and neither of Taiwan’s two main political parties working on it. “When you ask questions, you get these kind of answers, you know, ‘We have legislative and legal issues,’” he told me. “Fix them.”

man from country famous for its ineffectual government that constantly gets hung up on procedural issues when it tries to do anything (except murder brown people overseas) - "just fix your legislative issues lmao"

personally, I think countries should be allowed to just shoot any American who shows up in their land and starts whining "don't siege Leningrad, take it immediately" at them

The Israeli ability to achieve these goals hinged on sucking the US into maximal commitment in war against Iran. A second GWOT would have been ideal, with the US bogged down in Iran for years or even decades. At the moment, this too seems to have failed. While Iran has suffered substantial damage to its infrastructure, its government has survived. But what about its second goal, deterrence? Here's how things have changed since the start of this conflict:

• US bases in the Gulf region have been largely abandoned, many have suffered heavy damage ("uninhabitable" according to the NYT). The US has completely withdrawn from Syria and mostly withdrawn from Iraq. This is an unprecedented retreat.
• The US radar network that protects Israel and the Gulf states has been mostly destroyed
• Iran has demonstrated that it's both able and willing to light the region on fire and blockade it if threatened
• They've also demonstrated that their state is strong enough to withstand a major air US campaign
• The passage for ships through the Strait of Hormuz has been reduced from a 21mi wide corridor to one that's only ~3mi wide, between Larak and Qeshm. This makes future closures of the strait trivial. Even a small team of a few dozen IRGC personnel can now shut off 20% of global oil flows
• The broader political balance in the region is now up in the air. The GCC has suffered enormous economic damage. A new security architecture may emerge in response to this, possibly one that favors Iran

This is an improved position for Iran as compared to before the conflict, which is remarkable. They've made it clear that there's no reasonable path to the US/Israeli strategic goals. Continuing the air campaign or some kind of limited land invasion won't move the needle. If the air campaign didn't work before, it's even less likely to work now. Now that we're in a period of diplomacy, the Iranians are attempting to secure the long-term consolidation of their gains. They also stand a chance of extracting some incredible concessions:

• International acceptance of a toll regime on the strait
• The lifting of (some) sanctions
• Unfreezing of billions in Iranian funds (most of which are currently stored in Qatar)
• Normalization of relations with various states in Europe and Asia

If the Iranians play this game correctly, they can achieve some or all of these things while suffering no casualties (this is the power of diplomacy). The key to this is driving a wedge, no matter how minor, between the US and Israel. By refusing to compromise on a ceasefire in Lebanon and linking the status of the strait to that ceasefire, the Iranians seem to have done this. They need to make it clear that an Israeli violation of the ceasefire will result in the closure of the strait. This will ensure that the US continues to exert pressure on Israel to maintain the ceasefire. Exploiting this wedge is Iran's path to the long-term attrition of Israel. This conflict has brought the contradictions in the US/Israeli relationship to a head in an unprecedented way. So while the "fog of peace" remains largely impenetrable, don't expect the Iranians to go around signaling as loudly as possible that they'll be imposing tolls on the strait going forward. This may be their intention, but they're more likely to achieve it if they come to an agreement with the US behind the scenes and give Trump a way to sell it to the American public. They also might be willing to negotiate on it in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. The Iranian state and people will be best served by a peace in which they can extract the most concessions with the least cost to themselves. They're playing a delicate game, and the victory they could achieve here would have been almost unimaginable for most just two months ago.