Han Kuang 42: Learning to fight after things go wrong

Taiwan’s annual Han Kuang military exercise has long presented analysts with an interpretive problem. As Taiwan’s principal annual military exercise, Han Kuang is intended to test preparations for conflict with the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Yet exercises can be poor measures of actual military effectiveness. A unit moving tanks through Taipei or firing artillery at a target can demonstrate that a capability exists. It reveals much less about whether commanders can improvise after communications fail, reserve formations can become combat effective in hours rather than days, or Taiwan can continue fighting after ports, power networks, and command centers have been attacked.

Han Kuang 42, conducted from August 5 through 14, was more useful in this regard. The 10-day, nine-night exercise did not demonstrate that Taiwan could defeat a PRC invasion. Publicly available information is too limited to substantiate that conclusion. But it did provide evidence of something important: Taiwan has begun to organize its exercises around the problems most likely to determine whether it could survive the opening stages of a war.

The most significant change was the exercise methodology. Taiwan continued its shift toward unscripted training, while for the first time fully activating command centers at all levels and issuing orders dynamically in response to simulated enemy courses of action. Exercise planners withheld portions of the scenario from participating officers, forcing commanders to respond to developments rather than execute a predetermined sequence. Taiwan also incorporated U.S.-influenced training practices, including “backbriefs,” in which subordinates explain how they intend to execute an assigned mission, allowing commanders to verify understanding before execution.

This is potentially important for an armed force that has historically relied heavily on centralized command. Taiwan should expect headquarters, communications networks, and senior leaders to come under attack by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) early in a variety of wartime scenarios. Decentralized command is therefore more than a management preference; it is a requirement for operational survival. In this context, analysts will need to study future exercises to determine whether this iteration of Han Kuang’s emphasis on decentralized execution represents an enduring change in Taiwan’s command culture or remains principally an exercise innovation.

Training for war beyond the first strike

Han Kuang 42’s scenario reflected the same logic. The scenario unfolded with the PLA using military exercises to conceal preparations for an attack, followed by blockade, joint firepower strikes, amphibious and airborne operations, penetration of Taiwan’s coastal defenses, and an extended ground campaign. Taiwan’s armed forces practiced mobilization, dispersal, defensive mining, protection of critical infrastructure, anti-blockade operations, counter-landing operations, and defense in depth. The exercise even contemplated destroying facilities and materiel at risk of capture so that PLA forces could not use them.

This may be Han Kuang’s most consequential conceptual development. Taiwan exercised beyond its preferred outcome. Rather than assuming that its defenses would prevent the PLA from establishing a lodgment, Han Kuang examined how forces would continue operating after coastal defenses had been penetrated and enemy forces were advancing inland. The exercise also emphasized preserving command and political leadership, including urban military-police operations intended to prevent airborne or special operations forces from reaching critical command facilities in Taipei.

That matters for deterrence. Taiwan does not need to convince Beijing that every defensive position will hold. It needs to convince PRC leaders that an initial military success will not produce strategic success, and that Taiwan can absorb an attack without losing its ability, or will, to resist.

Reserve mobilization provided another useful test. Approximately 20,000 reservists participated in Han Kuang 42. Of these, roughly 5,000 belonged to two formations, the Taipei Reserve Brigade and Army 137th Infantry Brigade, which were selected to validate full-brigade mobilization. Reservists refreshed individual skills, trained with rifles and mortars, and participated in wartime deployment and force-protection missions.

The exercise also paid greater attention to sustaining a war rather than simply defeating an invasion fleet. For the first time, Taiwan’s navy and coast guard conducted a joint anti-blockade operation in which they escorted a merchant vessel carrying essential supplies toward eastern Taiwan and practiced securing the cargo after it reached port. The newly established Littoral Combat Command had its inaugural participation in Han Kuang, integrating coastal-defense missiles, radar, and unmanned systems. Taiwan also experimented with battlefield use and rapid fabrication of drones, including 3D-printed components.

These activities reflect a broader shift in the problem Taiwan is trying to solve. Destroying amphibious ships crossing the Taiwan Strait remains essential, but Han Kuang 42 asked what happens afterward: How does Taiwan preserve supplies, restore damaged capabilities, protect sea lines of communication, maintain logistics, and continue fighting as ammunition and infrastructure are attrited?

From military defense to societal resilience

Han Kuang 42 also blurred the boundary between military defense and societal resilience. The parallel Urban Resilience Exercises were integrated with Han Kuang and conducted sequentially across Taiwan. Local authorities practiced warning, evacuation and sheltering, traffic control, disaster response, and continuity of essential services. The government described the broader resilience program as a means of testing coordination among central and local governments and between the public and private sectors during war or major emergencies.

The most conspicuous experiment deliberately reduced mobile internet speeds for 30 minutes across 14 cities and counties in central and northern Taiwan. Telecommunications providers throttled mobile data while traditional landline networks and Wi-Fi remained available, allowing authorities to test emergency communications, backup networks, mobile base stations, radio systems, and low-earth-orbit satellite communications.

The communications experiment was useful precisely because it generated friction. While a half-hour reduction in bandwidth is fundamentally different from PLA strikes that physically destroy cell towers, cut fiber-optic connections, and disrupt power generation and supply, government and emergency systems continued functioning during the controlled slowdown. The test also generated public debate. Supporters argued that exposing citizens and agencies to actual degraded service produced greater realism. Critics questioned whether deliberately disrupting civilian communications was necessary. The debate itself illustrates a challenge inherent in whole-of-society defense: meaningful resilience exercises inevitably impose costs on the society they are intended to protect.

Civilian participation nevertheless appeared generally orderly. During the northern Taiwan exercise, air-raid warnings cleared streets, police directed civilians toward shelter, metro entrances were temporarily closed, and hospitals practiced moving functions underground. President Lai Ching-te publicly apologized for the inconvenience caused by the internet slowdown and asked for public support.

Han Kuang also produced the kinds of friction one would expect from a large exercise conducted amid civilian infrastructure and difficult weather. Taiwan’s defense ministry reported that participating units completed assigned tasks despite unexpected scenario injects and challenging terrain and weather, while Defense Minister Koo Li-hsiung directed commanders to identify and correct problems revealed by the exercise. This is an important point when evaluating Han Kuang. Mistakes during a large exercise should not automatically be interpreted as evidence of failure. If Taiwan genuinely wants Han Kuang to expose weaknesses rather than stage successful demonstrations, commanders and units must be permitted to encounter problems and feed lessons learned back into doctrine, training, procurement, and future exercises.

Assessing Taiwan’s performance

So how did Taiwan perform?

Better, in important respects, than the highly choreographed Han Kuang exercises of the past. What Han Kuang 42 demonstrated most convincingly was institutional movement in the right direction. Taiwan’s armed forces emphasized decentralized command, mobilization of reserve formations, resistance of blockades, logistics, industrial resilience, urban defense, drones, and integration with civilian agencies. These are increasingly the right problems.

What remains largely invisible is execution under sustained stress. Outside observers still know too little about how rapidly orders moved, how many reservists failed to report, whether logistics kept pace with maneuver, how joint fires were adjudicated, how units performed after losing communications, or how commanders reacted when their original plans became unusable.

Perhaps the most important lesson from Han Kuang 42 is that Taiwan’s defense reforms are moving beyond platforms and weapons toward the institutional requirements of resilience. Han Kuang did not answer whether Taiwan could stop the PLA. Instead, it showed that Taiwan is asking itself a harder and perhaps more useful question: Can it continue fighting when the opening phase of a war goes badly? For an effective deterrent, that is a question the whole of Taiwan’s society must be able to answer convincingly.