Taiwan's Defense Ministry announced on Tuesday that this year's annual war games will include "kill" zones at sea to break blockades and simulate scenarios in which China unexpectedly turns its routine drills near the island into real attacks.
China, asserting Taiwan as its territory, has conducted regular exercises near the island for the past four years, aiming to coerce Taipei into acknowledging Beijing's sovereignty despite Taiwan's firm opposition.
Taiwan will kick off its main annual Han Kuang exercises this month with tabletop drills extended from the usual five days to eight to accommodate the numerous scenarios, followed by actual combat exercises in July, the ministry added.
Tung Chih-hsing, head of the ministry's joint combat planning department, told a news briefing that the drills would practice how to speedily respond to one of China's drills suddenly turning into an attack, something military planners have begun to worry about given their regularity.
Another focus will be how different branches of the armed forces can mount a coordinated response to a Chinese blockade, Tung said.
The drills will integrate naval, air, and coast guard forces, shore-mounted anti-ship weapons, and drones to establish a maritime "attack and kill chain," he added.
"In addition, (we will) use naval and air forces and coast guard ships to jointly carry out escort operations" to ensure sea and air links to the outside world remain open, Tung said.
During one major round of war games around Taiwan in April of last year, China practiced precision strikes and blocked the island.
Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine two years ago, Taiwan has been looking to see what lessons it can learn and integrate into its own exercises, especially how the much smaller Ukrainian forces have been able to fend off the larger Russian military.
Tung said those would again feature this year, along with the lessons learned from the war in Gaza.
For both of those conflicts, Tung said officials were looking at the use of psychological warfare and asymmetric operations in particular, though without explaining exactly how they would figure in the drills.
Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen has championed the idea of "asymmetric warfare" to make its forces, which are also much smaller than China's, more mobile and hard to attack, with, for example, vehicle-mounted missiles and drones.
