A U.S. navy ship appears to have sailed through the Taiwan Strait on Wednesday. The transit has not been confirmed by Taiwan or the U.S. but maritime data indicated the presence of a vessel in the strait.
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00:00Open-source websites that track maritime data are tracking some kind of government or U.S. military ship that entered the Taiwan Strait on Tuesday, April 22nd.
00:09Its last known location is somewhere in waters southwest off the coast of southern Kaohsiung.
00:14Neither the U.S. military nor Taiwan's military has confirmed the transit, but Taiwan's Defense Ministry has told us that they are monitoring the situation.
00:21Now, it's important to remember that these kinds of transits are not unusual, as the U.S. normally operates military aircraft and ships in this region as a freedom of navigation exercise.
00:32The last transit was back in February.
00:34China has not yet lodged a formal complaint, but has sent military aircraft to that same region.
00:39Recently, the U.S. military has wanted to pivot its focus to the Indo-Pacific region, with Taiwan as a core focus.
00:45Taiwan's military says it's set to receive hundreds of missiles for the U.S.-made Patriot Missile Defense System, specifically the Pac-3 MSE, which is one of the newest and most advanced variants of the system.
00:57Earlier, I spoke to Kelly Greco, a security analyst from the Simpson Center base in Washington, D.C., and she says that this specific weapon can tell us a lot about how the U.S. and Taiwan are working together to counter China.
01:08I think it's quite noticeable that the sales that we're talking about is the Pac-3 MSE and not the F-35, because the air defense systems are consistent with an asymmetric defense becoming a porcupine.
01:22The F-35 is not.
01:24And so one of the things it tells me, perhaps, is that D.C. is going to be more inclined to approve these kinds of sales when they see it's consistent with the asymmetric defense that they think is in the best interest of Taiwan and U.S. interests.
01:36I think that the administration has been clear about that.
01:39So it wants it to spend more and it also wants it to spend better.
01:43So making sure that when you do spend those funds, you're spending it in a way that you're getting the maximum capability, the maximum deterrent and defense for each dollar that you're spending on that defense budget.
01:55We're only hearing that Taiwan is receiving several hundred of these missiles and we don't have an exact amount.
02:01But if there was a conflict between China and the United States and Taiwan, is that amount enough, the several hundred?
02:08It is unbelievable how quickly you can go through these interceptors.
02:12At the Stimson Center, I recently wrote a report looking at Chinese missile threats to U.S. air bases in the Indo-Pacific.
02:18And even when we had really large numbers of interceptors, more than actually exist in the U.S. inventory, one of the things that we found is that within 36 hours, we were out of interceptors in our simulation.
02:32So you could just go, you can burn through these really quickly and that then becomes a question of strategy.
02:39How are you going to employ these systems?
02:41And so we'd all like to create a defensive shield, like an impenetrable defensive shield that would prevent, you know, an adversary missile from being able to come through and strike an air base or a city.
02:53That's really not feasible to do that.
02:55Sources within the military say that the weapons systems should be arriving this year as well as next year.
03:01And more arms sales will continue as U.S. and Taiwan continue to bolster their defense ties.
03:06Patrick Chen, Kamushu, and Hami Okon in Taipei for Taiwan Plus.