HSINCHU, TAIWAN — Taiwan showcased rapid runway repair drills on Friday at its closest airbase to mainland China, where the island keeps its main fleet of interceptor fighter jets.
The island's air force practiced its response to a scenario where Chinese long-range missiles or rockets had already damaged facilities at Hsinchu Air Base.
The drills, part of the annual Han Kuang exercises, included rearming Dassault Mirage 2000-5s, performing emergency takeoffs, and restoring runways.
Ground teams used bulldozers and graders to clear debris and fill a crater in the concrete, after which troops practiced deploying and securing a heavy fiberglass mat as an Antelope short-range mobile surface-to-air missile system stood guard.
Hsinchu Air Base, about 90 miles from mainland China, is home to Taiwan's 53-strong fleet of Mirages, fourth-generation aircraft it began receiving in 1997.
The French aircraft are designated as Taiwan's primary interceptor fighters, with the island also fielding over 130 F-16 Fighting Falcons and 129 of its homegrown fighter jet, the F-CK-1 Ching-Kuo.
US runway repair operations also employ fiberglass mats, which are more suited for allowing smaller aircraft, such as fighter jets, to land and take off in a pinch.
Friday's drills particularly emphasized sustained air-to-air combat. Air force personnel practiced rapidly rearming Mirages with the Magic Missile II short-range missile and the MICA medium-range air-to-air missile system, while pilots and crews performed an emergency scramble of two Mirages.
Hsinchu Air Base is one of Taiwan's first military bases to be targeted, destroyed, or incapacitated by Chinese forces in the event of a full-scale assault, said Benjamin Blandin, a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, a Taipei think-tank backed by the Taiwanese government.
The base, which is about 2.3 square miles, is well-equipped but "very exposed to the first wave of ground, sea-born, and air-launched missiles" that the People's Liberation Army would likely pummel Taiwan with in the early stages of an invasion, Blandin said.
"Realistically, Hsinchu Air Base could be rendered inoperable after just the first missile wave, or at least in the first 24 hours," Blandin added.
This year's Han Kuang, Taiwan's annual rehearsal of a Chinese invasion, began on Wednesday and will last 10 days and 9 nights.
Taipei said this year's exercises would depart from the island's traditional, choreographed drill style to an unscripted format in which units are tested on their reactions.
The first few days of the exercises focused on "gray-zone tactics," coercive or hostile actions that don't necessarily constitute an outright declaration of war.
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Matthew is a senior reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau, primarily covering defense and how the war in Ukraine is rapidly changing battle technology and tactics.He joined the team in June 2021, previously focusing on internet crime and labor, examining how these issues impact modern society in Asia, with a particular emphasis on China.In 2024, he won the Singapore Press Club's Young Journalist of the Year Award. His work from 2023 also won a silver award from the North American Travel Journalists Association and accolades from Longreads.Matthew's previous work has been featured in the South China Morning Post, as well as Singaporean news companies TODAY and The Business Times.As a student, Matthew's coverage of migrant workers' nutrition in Singapore during the COVID pandemic won the SOAP Story of the Month award and the Student Category prize in the International Labor Organization's 2021 Global Media Competition on Labour Migration.Selected features:
- Death on the Savage Mountain: What really happened on K2, and why 100 climbers stepped over a dying man on their way to the summit
- The nuclear weapons era is making a comeback, and experts say we're all not paying attention
- How nets from a Danish fishing village found their way into Ukraine's modern war
- Inside Ukraine's race to crank out unjammable, fiber-optic drones that can break through Russia's electronic warfare
- Finding Dora
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