Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te, who took oath just last week, visited a frontline air force base in Hualien. Lai met and thanked fighter pilots who were scrambled as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) held an exercise which could be seen as an attempt to blockade the island nation. The Chinese had called the exercise a ‘punishment’ for electing ‘troublemaker separatist’ Lai, also known as William Lai. Even as Lai in his inaugural speech directly asked mainland China to help reduce tensions and work towards ensuring regional stability.
Due to China’s exercise, the Taiwanese military was put on high alert. The Hualien airbase, midway on Taiwan’s eastern coast also scrambled fighters, in this case F-16s, as China practiced blockade around the island. The airbase is said to be the most survivable in case of a Chinese attack as many of the hangers are dug inside a rocky mountain. William Lai commended and thanked the pilots after he received a detailed briefing on the abilities of the F-16, the most advanced aircraft in the Taiwanese inventory.
Taiwan is converting 141 older models to the latest standard. The Taiwanese Air Force is also scheduled to get 66 of the latest variants of the F-16. The entire Taiwanese F-16 fleet will be equipped with the advanced AN/APG-83 Scalable Agile Beam Radar (SABR), an Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radar, which will give Taiwanese fighter pilots better situational awareness. A much-needed move as the Chinese are increasingly using the 5th generation J-20.
This as China’s Eastern Theatre Command released a video in which it shows how an invasion of Taiwan would look like. The video focuses extensively on the Chinese 5th-generation J-20 fighter, stressing on the aircraft’s stealth capabilities. All of this as the American House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul is in Taiwan to mark 45 years of the Taiwan Relations Act.
