Taiwan’s Han Kuang exercise reforms have moved the island’s annual military drills decisively away from choreographed displays and into the streets, alleys, and civilian infrastructure where any real defence of Taiwan would actually be fought. This year’s iteration, Han Kuang 42, unfolded across the island of 23 million people in a series of logistics and combat drills designed to stress-test both the military and the society it is meant to protect.
The shift was visible at street level. In Taipei’s Wanhua cultural district, an infantry platoon unloaded sandbags on pedestrian crossings after midnight. Clouded Leopard infantry fighting vehicles emerged between shophouses and opened fire with blanks into a killbox formed with barricades, while military police covered the roads with smoke grenades. The drill simulated a bridge defence against Chinese forces. A middle-aged woman, phone in hand, tried to reach her Uber on the far side of the intersection. A military policeman carrying a T112 assault rifle apologised and turned her back.
South of the Songshan airport, diners stepped out of a barbecue restaurant to watch troops firing blanks from alleys and rooftops. A police cruiser arrived halfway through, apparently responding to a noise complaint. In Kaohsiung, a delivery worker on a scooter sped past a reservist guard to drop off mail at a nearby auto shop, while reservists lined the main road with barricades, barbed wire, and damaged vehicles. A softball team practised in the late-morning heat a few dozen yards away. Troops in urban areas used blanks; live ammunition was fired only on Taiwan’s outlying islands.
From staged performance to genuine operational verification
Taipei said last year that the Han Kuang would be reformed to focus on unscripted exercises rather than the force-on-force spectacles of previous years, which were designed partly for public and external audiences. Lin Ping-yu, a former Taiwanese special forces paratrooper now serving as a city councillor for New Taipei City, described the change plainly: ‘This year’s Han Kuang exercise gradually shifted away from “staged performances” designed for senior officials and the public, moving toward genuine operational verification.’
One procedural change illustrates the depth of that shift. According to AP News, a key component of this year’s drills was the practice of backbriefing, a communications method drawn from US military doctrine in which subordinates explain to commanders precisely how they plan to carry out assigned missions. The technique reinforces independent decision-making at lower levels of command, which matters most when headquarters communications are disrupted or destroyed.
That scenario played out during the exercises. As Typhoon Dolphin drove rainstorms into Taipei on the fourth day, military police special forces with machine guns and antitank launchers took positions in park treelines near the Nangang Exhibition Center. The scenario assumed their central Taipei command had suffered heavy casualties; surviving units were retreating by subway to Nangang, where the visitor centre was being set up as a makeshift headquarters. Civilian infrastructure featured throughout: reservists gathered in schools, privately owned factories were converted into backup arms-production facilities, and a culture park served as a vehicle-repair station.
Han Kuang exercise reforms extend to reservists and public communications
The scale of Han Kuang 42’s reservist component added another layer to the exercise’s ambition. According to Mick Ryan’s Substack, the drills included an approximately 20,000-reservist mobilisation exercise, reflecting Taiwan’s effort to build a credible reserve force as part of a broader whole-of-society defence posture.
The public was folded into the drills more directly than in previous years. For the first time, city governments throttled mobile internet for 30-minute periods during the exercise, aiming to get people thinking about how an attack would affect communications. On one Thursday afternoon, air-raid alerts buzzed on mobile phones across Taipei, ordering people indoors. The streets emptied: buses, cars, and motorbikes were left on the roads as the capital fell quiet for half an hour.
Lin said that Taiwan had previously conducted its civil and military exercises separately, and combining them was one of the most consequential changes made this year. ‘This shift helps the public grow more accustomed to the presence of military units in their daily lives,’ he said. He also raised concerns that years of relaxed cross-strait relations had caused Taiwan’s military to ‘forget how to operate as a truly effective fighting force.’
Not everything went smoothly. On 9 August, a civilian truck carrying 155mm howitzer shells spilled its load along a highway in Miaoli while navigating a bend. The rounds were inert, and the Taiwan Ministry of National Defence said the fastening straps on the shells had come loose, describing the incident as evidence that transport operations had room for improvement.
Tristan Tang, a Taipei-based nonresident fellow at the National Bureau of Asian Research, offered a broad assessment: ‘If you look at the exercises as a whole, Taiwan is actually training for almost every major contingency it could face.’ Lin put the stakes in starker terms, describing Taiwan’s military as being in a ‘critical transition’ phase. ‘We are now at a pivotal moment to reclaim these core military capabilities,’ he said, ‘and conducting more rigorous exercises will help the military rebuild its operational edge.’