Deep in Norwegian woods, some 400 kilometers away from the Russian border, an officer of the Norwegian Long Range Reconnaissance Squadron is hidden in a snow-made shelter, with only his light-grey firearm peeking out.

The officer, nicknamed Poster Boy, is part of the country’s elite Arctic task force, designed to operate far behind enemy lines to conduct surveillance missions. The snow cave serving as his concealment is known as a quinzhee, 1.5m high and 2m wide, built by piling snow together and allowing it to sinter, or harden, a task force specialty.

Nations withdraw some equipment from NATO Arctic exercise amid Iran fallout

“It’s a constant evolution of what works and what doesn’t for us – what worked four years ago might not work today due to all the technology developments of equipment designed to catch us, some years ago a tent and camouflage could’ve been sufficient but not anymore,” the officer, who spoke anonymously because of the sensitivity around the unit, told Defense News.

Training here alongside the Norwegian soldiers were several other nations’ elite unit, including U.K. Royal Marines and soldiers of the Canadian Special Operations Forces Command. Royal Marines told Defense News that, given the speed of modern combat, units that want to stay invisible often have to move every 15 minutes to avoid detection.

Besides hiding from enemy drones, the Norwegian reconnaissance soldiers carry their own unmanned craft to spy on adversaries.

The unit is experimenting with different types of winterized surveillance drones, including the American-made Skydio and first-person-view models, to provide eyes in the sky and enable operations from greater distances on the battlefield.

Poster Boy said those systems will be increasingly relevant, especially in the event of a potential conflict with Russia, where the battle space would consist of vast stretches of icy land.

The Norwegian Army chief, Maj. Gen. Lars Lervik, told Defense News that drones were playing an important role in NATO’s largest Arctic exercise, Cold Response 2026, organized across Norway from March 9-19. He noted that aside from surveillance-type ones, forces are also testing attack drones and several unmanned ground robots in ground-to-ground and air-to-ground roles.

The name of the game for the quinzhee connaisseurs is silence and invisibility, two objectives that are increasingly hard to achieve, as seen in the war in Ukraine, where troops and equipment remain perpetually vulnerable to being located.

One way to mitigate these risks is to focus on tracking avoidance in snow, which relies on minimizing a soldier’s visual, thermal or electronic signatures. The Norwegian Defense Materiel Agency announced last month that recent trials in Denmark confirmed the effectiveness of the Swedish-made Mobile Camouflage System. Developed by Saab, the cloak is intended to greatly reduce detectability by limiting visual, thermal and radar signatures, including in Arctic conditions.

However, amid new technologies, the Norwegian top-tier Arctic unit continues to return to proven basics: using natural camouflage, such as snow, as its best bet for staying hidden.

“Using snow is our absolute best concealment – we move in darkness, foggy conditions, snow falls, where our tracks can be rapidly filled and hard to follow, and in good weather we stay static and concealed,” the officer explained.

The navy is experimenting with its simulator drills to put crews in “increasingly stressful situations,” said Capt. Jérôme Henry, the head of training for the navy’s surface personnel, at the Paris Naval Conference this week. Henry said he’s drawing on past experience as commander of the frigate Alsace, which came under attack multiple times in the Red Sea, to “toughen up our crews.”

“What I saw in the Red Sea is that when you’re under intense stress, people react more or less well but in any case, you lose some of your composure, you get what’s called tunnel vision,” Henry told Defense News on the sidelines of the conference. “If we’re going to be in high-intensity combat, our crews need to be ready for that stress, and the question is, how are we going to prepare them?”

French, UK naval chiefs urge dramatic changes in warship design

Training tweaks include crews going for a run or doing push-ups right before stepping into weapon simulators to get heart rates up, creating sensory overload by adding noise, smoke and drone swarms to simulations, and adding weapon malfunctions in drills, said Henry, who took on his current role last year.

Henry says he adopted the idea of stress drills from the French Navy’s special forces, the Commandos Marine, and is seeking to find out how American and Israeli forces include stress in their training.

The goal for now is to dial up stress levels “as high as possible” to ensure that reflex actions are always the right ones, the training chief said. Henry said the challenge is the difficulty of putting people under such stress “that they feel like their final hour has come.”

The training division is trying to create the most disruptive environment possible in its simulators, so that personnel including gunners and missile operators “can mechanize their actions” to ensure they’ll be able to perform in combat whatever the situation, according to Henry.

“I know what it feels like to take a missile on the nose at four times the speed of sound,” Henry said. “So we know where we start to get stressed, we know we have to prepare for that.”

The most important lesson learned from the Red Sea is the need to be ready at all times, Adm. Harold Liebregs, commander of the Royal Netherlands Navy, told Defense News.

“The time when we could leave port, then build up and then see what mission we were going to do, that has changed,” Liebregs said. “It’s about training, but also about buildup. It’s about everything becoming more and more realistic, and it starts with having your war plans ready.”

Liebregs said the officer who commanded the support ship Karel Doorman during its deployment in the Red Sea, Paul Bijleveld, is now the navy’s commander for Sea Training, “so all the lessons we learned there, he’ll take onboard. Perhaps that is no coincidence.”

Western navies lack combat experiences in terms of high-intensity naval war, said Capt. Bryan McCavour, deputy assistant chief of staff for information warfare at the United Kingdom’s Royal Navy, who spoke on a panel with Henry. With fewer and fewer platforms in national fleets, ongoing problems with ship maintenance and availability, training is consistently getting compressed, he said.

“If we’re going to engender that war-fighting spirit and maintain it, and have that culture as a decisive factor in battle, we need to invest more time in high-end war-fighting training than I think we currently do,” McCavour said.

McCavour said it’s been longer since the Falklands War than between that conflict and World War II, and “combat-ready naval forces in that sense maybe don’t exist today in the way we think, because it’s been a very long time since we had a high-end conflict.”

He said Russia was reminded of that lesson with the sinking of the cruiser Moskva in the Black Sea, and Western forces need to take that into account when they look at responding in the South China Sea or the High North around the Kola Peninsula.

The Red Sea was also “a little bit the rediscovery” of low-end threats, with renewed focus on small-caliber weapons and cannons, and a pipeline of defensive layers including jamming, light missiles and laser-guided rockets, according to Henry, who directed the navy’s annual Wildfire drone exercise to focus on saturation as well as the risk of friendly fire in a busy environment.

“When you have a lot of things flying around you, and you open fire with other friendly units, we saw in the Red Sea that mistakes can be made,” Henry said. “So we’re working on that.”

The French Navy is furthermore training for combat while minimizing radio emissions, relying on adversary emissions to build situational awareness, according to Henry. The force is working to cut reliance on satellite positioning, helped by improved inertial-navigation systems as well as astral sights using the stars for positioning.

Henry mentioned the ‘Back to the ‘80s’ exercises by the French carrier strike group, which entails forgoing satellite communications and instead using HF and UHF radio for comms, “and above all, to be more frugal in our exchanges.”

Cyber warfare is the prime example of a threat likely to deprive naval forces of capabilities “at the worst possible moment,” according to Capt. Florian El-Ahdab, commanding officer of the French frigate Languedoc. He said preparing for eventualities such as loss of connectivity requires ‘Back to 80s’ type exercises and placing forces in situations of “great discomfort.”

“Today’s sailors reflect today’s society, so if I took your smartphone away today and told you to go somewhere, I’m not sure you’d feel very comfortable,” said El-Ahdab. He said “it’s the same thing” for the navy.

“If you take away all the tools available to the commander today, and all the amazing tools that are currently being developed, if I suddenly tell you that all of that is no longer available for one reason or another, how would you respond?” El-Ahdab asked. “That seems like a very, very good challenge to explore.”

Dubbed the Dataroom, the secure digital environment will allow Ukrainian defense companies to train and validate their algorithms by relying on real-world intelligence on Russian aerial threats collected by the country’s military.

The workspace has been envisioned with the goal of equipping interceptor drones with AI to enhance their target detection, classification and neutralization capabilities.

“In the future, we plan to expand the Dataroom’s abilities to other areas related to autonomy and AI – but for now, our focus is on the most urgent task: countering the threats that appear in our skies, Shahed-type drones,” Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, wrote in a post on his LinkedIn page.

The official noted that while interceptor drones have been effective on the battlefield, defending against thousands of targets requires a high degree of autonomy and the ability for the systems to identify and counter targets independently.

The Dataroom is currently only accessible to Ukrainian industry, primarily due to the sensitivity of the information used for training.

Palantir Technologies, co-founded by libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, opened an office in Kyiv and has cooperated significantly with Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation. The company’s MetaConstellation software is used by Ukraine to gather and visualize data of enemy positions and equipment via a network of commercial satellites, sensors, drones, and other systems.

Ukrainian military commander Oleksandr Syrskyi said in an interview with online media outlet lb.ua this week that Russia can produce more than 400 different kinds of Shahed-type drones daily and that it plans to increase this number to 1,000.

The exercises take place amid heightened security concerns over China’s aggressive actions in the West Philippine Sea and regional developments involving Taiwan.

“We are looking at all possible scenarios and we are incorporating those into the exercises, so we are prepared for any eventuality,” Philippine military Chief of Staff Gen. Romeo Brawner Jr. told reporters during the launch of the exercise on Nov. 4.

The annual military drill, known as the Armed Forces of the Philippines Joint Exercise Dagat-Langit-Lupa (AJEX DAGIT-PA), will include training on integrated air and missile defense operations, defending gas and oil platforms, land defense, and amphibious exercises aimed at retaking islands, airfields and seaports.

Officials told Defense News that planners and strategists have studied hundreds of conflict scenarios, including potential missile attacks, and crafted the training program to assess troop response and spot defense gaps.

Like previous editions, the exercises will be conducted in the country’s northern and western borders.

A segment will be held in Thitu Island or Pag-asa Island, a Philippine-controlled territory in the South China Sea that is home to around 400 Filipinos. Experts and military officials have identified Thitu as a likely initial target in an invasion.

The country’s armed forces, dubbed AFP, have conducted special operations and civilian defense training there. The agenda for this year includes naval surface fire support drills, but the military declined to confirm if these will accompany amphibious landing exercises.

Unlike previous iterations, this year’s edition will engage fewer troops with only 2,000 compared to last year’s 3,000. Instead, the military reserve forces, the Philippine Coast Guard, and the Philippine National Police will participate to complement end strength, Brawner said.

The agenda will also include training on cyber, electronic, and space-related warfare.

“These are not just simulations,” Brawner said. “The exercises are strategic rehearsals for real-world contingencies, validating our concepts of operations … we will also test out the new unilateral defense plan,” he added.

Since 2023, the Philippine military has officially shifted to external defense and last year released a Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept (CADC) to guide its defense doctrine.

Details of the strategy remain sparse, however, and it’s uncertain how the military would operationalize this concept given its limited resources and capabilities.

The AFP revealed a shift toward a new “unilateral defense plan” called Bantay Kalayaan late last year to implement the defensive concept, which was tested under the previous AJEX DAGIT-PA training program.

The current module builds on lessons learned from last year, officials said, as it includes a more streamlined command-and-control unit solely for territorial defense – a significant move to reflect the expanding defense focus.

The AFP established its Strategic Command in late October, the lead participating unit in the ongoing exercise. The unit will be responsible for areas outside the purview of joint command units. This includes exclusive economic zones, occupied territories in the South China Sea, and the aerial domain.

Gen. Brawner suggested the AFP Strategic Command may become the principal commanding unit of the fighting forces in wartime.

“The battle staff in the GHQ (General Headquarters) cannot transform into a full-blown battle staff to fight the war,” Brawner said. “That is why I was convinced that we have to organize an AFP Strategic Command … and we rushed toward establishing it so they could be the main participant in this exercise,” he said.

While the Philippines has joined hundreds of joint military drills with allies, the internal military exercise is crucial in beefing up the country’s defense, as Filipino troops will be “fighting the war by ourselves in the first part,” Brawner said.

Brawner explained that, should war break out, the armed forces must hold out for at least a month before possible reinforcements from allies.

“This exercise is crucial so we can see the limit of our defense architecture. If war breaks out, we will be the first to defend ourselves,” Brawner said, adding that despite the scenario, the Philippines is “also expecting help from our ally under our mutual defense treaty.”

The Eastern Mediterranean drills suggest Ankara and Cairo are easing tensions, though their strategic interests remain far from aligned.

The exercise, dubbed Sea of Friendship-2025 (Bahr El Sadaka) held between Sept. 22 and 26, 2025, was the first such training after a 13-year hiatus.

According to the Turkish Navy, top brass present included Turkish Fleet Commander Adm. Kadir Yıldız and Chief of Staff of the Egyptian Navy Rear Adm. (UH) Mohamed Hassan El-Sherbeny.

The two countries had regularly held joint military exercises until 2012, when political relations deteriorated after the overthrow of the Egyptian government. Diplomatic ties remained strained for more than a decade, halting defense cooperation.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s February 2024 visit to Cairo, his first in 12 years, marked a broader normalization effort spanning political, economic, and security domains, opening channels for political dialogue, trade and even for military cooperation.

Ret. Rear Adm. Cem Okyay framed the Turkey–Egypt naval exercise as both a symbolic and practical milestone. He stressed that while Turkish and Egyptian ships have long shared the same waters, conducting joint drills after more than a decade reflects a new diplomatic opening spearheaded by the navies themselves.

Beyond the military dimension, Okyay highlighted growing opportunities for defense industry cooperation, modernization projects and humanitarian missions. He argued that Ankara’s cautious rapprochement with Cairo is reinforced by economic investments and high-level political dialogue, showing the relationship runs deeper than a one-off exercise.

Serhat Güvenç, a professor of international relations, described the the event as a cautious but notable thaw in ties. He argued the drills marked the end of a long freeze, signaling that Ankara and Cairo have regained enough trust to cooperate militarily once again.

At the same time, he framed the exercise as a pointed message to Israel, whose aggressive moves in the Eastern Mediterranean have also unsettled Egypt.

Yet Güvenç warned against exaggerating the degree of rapprochement. That is because Egypt has not shifted on its core interests, as shown by its recent rejection of Turkey’s maritime boundary deal with Libya.

The joint exercise suggests the “bad old days” are behind the two countries, but it does not mean their strategic positions in the region fully align, Güvenç said.

The Japan Air Self-Defense Force, or JASDF, has made small steps to begin turning around what experts have described as an obsolete training ecosystem. Officials have already selected Textron’s T-6JP Texan II as its basic trainer to replace the Fuji T-7, and a T-6 procurement contract should be signed before year’s end.

However, Japan next needs to think clearly about how to replace its Kawasaki T-4 intermediate jet trainers, more than 200 of which entered service from 1988. With the JASDF now flying fifth-generation F-35A/F-35B fighters, the T-4 is deemed unfit for the task of transitioning fighter pilots to such advanced aircraft.

Tokyo is currently mulling its options for new advanced jet trainers. It issued a request for information in October 2024, and the submission deadline closed on May 8, 2025.

Select domestic and foreign vendors attending DSEI Japan, held in Chiba from May 21-23, were touting their respective products.

Boeing was promoting the T-7A Red Hawk, while Leonardo believes the M-346 Block 20 is best suited. Elsewhere, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) is even proffering a clean-sheet T-X design.

American advantage?

Responding to a Defense News question about the T-7A at DSEI Japan 2025, John Suding, Boeing’s Executive Director for Defense and Government Services in East Asia, said, “We believe the T-7 would be a fantastic fit.”

He continued, “The training that it will do for the United States Air Force is very similar to the training that Japan does for their air force, and particularly for their fighter fleet, so with F-35s and F-15s being upgraded, there’s a lot of commonality there within the training system.”

One thing in favor of an American platform being eventually selected was a U.S.-Japan leaders’ summit in April 2024. This saw the two countries announce exploration of joint development of a trainer aircraft to replace the T-4 fleet.

European edge

However, Leonardo believes it has a compelling offering with its M-346 Block 20, a new variant with improved avionics and cockpit display that will be delivered to first customer, Austria, in 2028.

The company had a cockpit simulator at DSEI Japan 2025, and Diego Siccardi, responsible for Leonardo’s international campaigns in the Far East and Oceania, highlighted several points in the platform’s favor.

One is that, since 2022, a handful of Japanese fighter pilots have been flying M-346s in advanced fighter training in the commercially run International Flight Training School (IFTS) in Sardinia, Italy. Siccardi said, “They’re really happy about the training level they’re getting there,” with plans to expand pilot numbers.

Another advantage is Japan’s rapidly expanding cooperation with Europe under the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP). Creating synergy, this trilateral project involves Leonardo and Japan. It’s a landmark program for Tokyo, given that it traditionally cooperates so closely only with the United States.

Thirdly, Siccardi stressed Leonardo’s willingness to transfer technology to Japan and work with domestic Japanese partners. “We’re looking to maximize the indigenous content,” he acknowledged.

Japanese next-gen

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries displayed a scale model depicting a T-X trainer aircraft at DSEI Japan 2025. With work commencing last year, the project is still in its early stages, so officials could not provide too many clear details.

The twin-engine aircraft would feature an advanced cockpit system containing large touchscreens, as well as embedded simulator functions. Officials told Defense News that the T-X could also replace F-2B and F-15DJ trainer variants, which explains why the trainer’s size approaches that of an F-2.

However, the factor mitigating against the T-X is time. It would take multiple years to develop and be ready for procurement. Therefore, its future entirely depends on the JASDF’s schedule for retiring the T-4 and whether Japan’s Ministry of Defence wants to pursue a wholly indigenous design.

Training pipeline

As the JASDF updates its trainer aircraft platforms, there is an opportunity to simultaneously overhaul its training system. CAE is one company keen to help.

Marc-Olivier Sabourin, CAE’s Division President, Defence & Security International, told Defense News: “The current Japanese program is relying on assets that are becoming obsolete, so their training throughput is challenged. But also the training proficiency they get with their existing training system still creates a significant gap between the cadet knowledge and F-35 operations.”

CAE does not currently hold any JASDF contract for pilot training, but there is growing interest from Japan for an integrated learning environment. This appetite was whetted when CAE ran a study with 30 Japanese pilot cadets around one and a half years ago.

That study utilized virtual reality-based simulators to provide independent instruction and coaching. Gary Eves, CAE’s principal technology officer, said: “We completed the study, and we were able to show that within just one hour of AI-based coaching, I could make about a 20% improvement on their grade performance without an instructor.”

“I am glad to be working with Meta once again,” Luckey is quoted as saying in the post. “My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that.”

This partnership stems from the Soldier Borne Mission Command (SBMC) Next program, formerly called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) Next. IVAS was a massive military contract, with a total $22 billion budget, originally awarded to Microsoft in 2018 intended to develop HoloLens-like AR glasses for soldiers.

But after endless problems, in February the Army stripped management of the program from Microsoft and awarded it to Anduril, with Microsoft staying on as a cloud provider. The intent is to eventually have multiple suppliers of mixed reality glasses for soldiers.

All of this meant that if Luckey’s former employer, Meta, wanted to tap into the potentially lucrative world of military VR/AR/XR headsets, it would need to go through Anduril.

The devices will be based on tech out of Meta’s AR/VR research center Reality Labs, the post says. They’ll use Meta’s Llama AI model, and they will tap into Anduril’s command and control software known as Lattice. The idea is to provide soldiers with a heads-up display of battlefield intelligence in real time.

Luckey is apparently feeling good about this reconciliation. He was, of course, famously fired from Facebook in 2017, about three years after Facebook bought his startup Oculus for $2 billion. This came after Luckey was embroiled in a brouhaha over his support for Donald Trump in his 2016 election. Luckey turned around and founded Anduril in 2017, with co-founders Brian Schimpf, Trae Stephens, and Matt Grimm.

An Anduril spokesperson tells TechCrunch that the product family Meta and Anduril are building is even called EagleEye, which will be an ecosystem of devices.

EagleEye is what Luckey named Anduril’s first imagined headset in Anduril’s pitch deck draft, before his investors convinced him to focus on building software first.

“All of them had worked with me for years via Oculus VR, and when they saw the EagleEye headset in our first Anduril pitch deck draft, they pointed out that it seemed like I was sequencing things irrationally. They believed, correctly, that I was too focused on winning a pissing contest over the future of AR/VR, on proving that I was right and the people who fired me were wrong,” Luckey tweeted in February after winning the IVAS contract.

After Thursday’s news, Luckey posted on X: “It is pretty cool to have everything at our fingertips for this joint effort – everything I made before Meta acquired Oculus, everything we made together, and everything we did on our own after I was fired.”

And to show that Luckey has really buried the hatchet, he said Anduril has even launched a Facebook page.

The sinking of the BRP Miguel Malvar happened roughly 30 nautical miles west of San Antonio, Zambales, Philippines, a U.S. spokesman for the exercise said in a statement on Monday.

Still, certain elements of the Balikatan 25 Maritime Strike live-fire portion of the drill, in which the vessel was to participate, would take place as planned, according to the statement.

US, Philippines expand exercise to territorial edges amid tension with China

The Miguel Malvar “took on water while being positioned,” the statement reads, and sank at 7:20 a.m. at its intended location for the live-fire event. No personnel were injured, it notes.

“As is common, the vessel was selected because it exceeded its service life and was no longer suitable for normal operations,” the statement said.

While the vessel sank, the glitch did not sink the ability to conduct a command post exercise as part of the live-fire event. The statement did not detail what elements were still scheduled as part of the drill, but said “the combined force will still achieve its training objectives.”

The Armed Forces of the Philippines and U.S. joint task forces “will rehearse virtual and constructive fire missions,” the statement says. “The training will integrate ground, maritime, and air-based sensors and shooters into a combined, joint fires network, as the Philippine and U.S. joint task forces exercise command and control while increasing combined warfighting capability.”

Taipei is aware of the threat posed by Beijing’s forces forces, but officials acknowledge more must be done to deter and, if need be, fight an invasion. That message was prominently included in the Chinese-language Quadrennial Defense Review, published last month, now available as an English translation.

“Training courses and intensity will be increased to enrich combat skills of troops at all levels, and enhance their immediate combat-readiness capabilities,” the document states.

A Defense News reporter has witnessed Taiwanese training events on multiple occasions, which often resembled formulaic and choreographed drills divorced from the fog of war in modern warfare.

A lack of realism has also been fingered as a problem by U.S. observers and advisors.

Rupert J. Hammond-Chambers, president of the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council, told Defense News that the QDR’s aspiration for better training amounts to an important self-criticism.

“Training is a huge area of needed progress,” he noted. “This is going hand in hand with U.S. willingness to liberalize past political boundaries and support expanded training on Taiwan and in the States.”

Randall Schriver, chairman of the U.S.-based Project 2049 Institute, testified to the U.S. Senate in late March that Washington must do more in training Taiwan’s forces.

“That was taboo for decades, and now we’re getting them to a point where they’re more professional, more proficient, as they’re placing a greater emphasis on training,” he told senators.

The QDR listed ways of improving the situation, such as “realistic combat training which is carried out in a force-on-force, on-site and real-time manner.” The review said this is necessary “in response to the enemy’s diversified threats and rapid changes in battlefields.”

One example of China’s evolving tactics was the introduction of new landing barges, exposed in satellite imagery in January. These mobile bridges were employed in a People’s Liberation Army (or PLA) exercise on a Guangdong beach in mid-March.

The innovative devices help military vehicles and supplies move rapidly from ship to shore.

Andrew Erickson, Professor of Strategy at the U.S. Naval War College, warned: “Make no mistake: China’s new bridge-barges are purpose-built for a Taiwan invasion scenario.”

By aligning three landing bridges in a row, a 900-yard-long causeway is created, allowing civilian or naval vessels to berth and unload equipment straight onto beaches.

Erickson explained this unique platform “may represent the missing piece in the puzzle for China to be able to attempt to deploy ferry-delivered, follow-on forces in support of an amphibious assault to the most advantageous locations along Taiwan’s coastline”.

Due to terrain and environmental conditions, the Project 2049 Institute previously identified just 14 Taiwanese beaches suitable for large-scale amphibious landings. However, these new bridge-barges expand the number of potential landing sites, complicating the equation for Taiwanese defense planners.

Taiwan’s defense review urged the armed forces to “construct realistic battlefield environments for joint training and exercises, force-on-force drills, and live-fire shooting practices to validate their results under near realistic combat conditions”.

Last year, Taiwan raised its conscription period from four to twelve months, citing “enemy threats.” Low morale and personnel retention remain problematic, however, something to which poor training contributes.

Conscripts were once lucky to receive a full magazine of bullets to fire during their national service, but the QDR promises they will now also learn how to operate complex weapons such as man-portable air defense missiles, drones and antitank rockets.

Despite such weaknesses, Hammond-Chambers said the latest QDR “grapples with the totality of the threat.”

He believes Taiwan is taking the PLA threat seriously enough. For example, “Defense spending has doubled in the past eight years, and the level of support from the U.S. too has improved in many areas, if not all.”

In terms of Taiwan preparedness, he noted there are “real bright spots, such as deterring a kinetic invasion. But in areas such as gray zone, blockade and critical infrastructure, there is much work to be done.”

Taiwan’s military has an immediate opportunity to demonstrate training improvements, after this year’s major Han Kuang exercise commenced on April 5. This fortnight-long tabletop drill contrasts with last year’s eight-day program.

Maj. Gen. Tung Chi-hsing, director of the Ministry of National Defense’s joint operations planning division, said the wargames have created scenarios in which frequent PLA military exercises escalate into a real attack on Taiwan.

The live-fire segment of Han Kuang will take place July 8-18, and this will see 20,000 reservists mobilized, up from 14,000 last year.