Taiwan’s Army has crossed a symbolic and operational threshold: on June 10, 2026, it conducted its first-ever live-fire exercise with US-supplied HIMARS launchers on the island’s western shoreline, sending rockets directly into the Taiwan Strait from Taichung. Every previous HIMARS firing — including the system’s Taiwan debut in 2025 — took place on the Pacific-facing east coast, safely pointed away from the mainland. This time, the precision rockets flew toward China.

Taiwan’s military has a personnel problem that its equipment purchases cannot solve. The active force — approximately 165,000 personnel across the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines — is designed for a conventional defense posture that the island’s strategic situation may not support. The reserve force, nominally numbering in the millions, is trained to a standard that multiple independent assessments have described as inadequate for the dispersed, mobile operations that Taiwan’s actual defense requirements would demand. The gap between the military on paper and the military that can fight is the most urgent operational readiness problem Taiwan faces, and it is one that requires sustained political will rather than procurement decisions to address.