How do You Say "Frog Soup" in Mandarin?
...or would Cantonese be more appropriate?
青蛙汤 or qīngwā tāng, perhaps? Well, that is what google says, but let’s not get distracted as I want to direct your attention to this graph by Ian Ellis:
Kathrin Hille over at Financial Times helps explain the significance.
Taiwan’s defence minister has warned that China’s growing military activity will make it more difficult to spot harbingers of an attack on his country.
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“We have to think about how we differentiate between peacetime and wartime,” Koo told reporters. “The scale of [China’s military] activity is getting larger and larger, and so it is harder to discern when they might be shifting from training to a large exercise, and from an exercise to war.”
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Taiwan’s military has registered a record 2,076 PLA incursions this year into its air defence identification zone
This is exactly how you lull someone into complacency, and it is exactly what I would do if I were advising the PRC. Is it sustainable? Is it just a temporary thing? We’ll find out.
There is one thing we need Taiwan to do: take their security seriously if they expect the entire US defense establishment to turn their eyes west of the International Date Line.
While Lai’s cabinet has proposed a 7.7 per cent increase in defence spending to NT$647bn (US$20bn) for next year, the figure marks a slight drop in terms of GDP, from 2.5 per cent this year to 2.45 per cent. Koo, the head of the National Security Council under Lai’s predecessor Tsai Ing-wen, took office in May and has pushed the country’s armed forces to make training more realistic and cut bureaucracy.
What should they do? Simple. Be as responsible as the Poles.
Poland will spend 5% of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence in 2025, the foreign minister told Bloomberg Television in an interview broadcast on Friday evening.
Warsaw has already ramped up defence spending to more than 4% of its economic output this year in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
"Poland spends 4 (percent of GDP on defence) and we are going to spend 5 next year," Radoslaw Sikorski said. "We are number one in NATO including the United States, in proportion obviously, because we are no longer in eternal post-Cold War peace."
The chart is representative of an intent or Signal to Noise ratio. The signal is breaking through the back ground noise and demonstrates the PRC intent. Like Maps. analytical charts with facts, don’t lie.
CDR Sal, as you note these are training and logistical sustainment exercises for the PLA which may or may not be sustainable for them, but are certainly taxing the ability of the Taiwanese to respond to in a meaningful way. OBTW it's not just the Taiwanese who are being made "numb" with the view that the level of activity is "normal". It's the region, the U.S., and the world. The "ho hum, another day, another escalation of ADIZ incursions, ship "close encounters with damage", another second island chain declaration" and so on allow for the ratcheting up of activity levels as "normal" which can cause intel to miss genuinely threatening activity. The Japanese see themselves as seriously under threat, and are taking significant actions to defend themselves. Given their traditional "self defense" approach since WW II, hard to not see their military buildup as a declining confidence in our commitment to the region.