Taiwan's military and civilian agencies will slow mobile networks across drill zones for the first time during this August's joint exercises, simulating wartime communications blackouts — but a leading defense analyst says that civilian inconvenience is a sideshow. The real question, he warns, is whether Taiwan's armed forces can fight when their own communications go silent.
The August exercises combine two major components: the Han Kuang No. 42 military exercise and the Urban Resilience Drill, expanded from one day to two this year. For the first time, the two will run under fully shared military-civilian scenarios, with the first-ever validation of cross-county coordination. Training covers medical facility dispersal to underground locations, mass evacuation, battlefield medical retreat, joint logistics, and drone supply runs — all aimed at building whole-of-society defense resilience.
Zhou Yuping (周宇平), an advisory committee member at the Taiwan Think Tank (台灣智庫), a Taipei-based policy research institution, welcomed the expansion but urged a sharper focus. Measuring success by whether civilians handle a few hours without mobile data, he argued, misses the point entirely. The test that matters is whether Taiwan's military can sustain combat operations when all communications infrastructure collapses at once.
"The true challenge isn't the inconvenience of not having a smartphone to use," Zhou said. "It's having to confront the brutal reality that communications and information capabilities could go to zero in an instant."
He added that the greatest value of any exercise lies not in proving a force has no problems, but in actively exposing wartime vulnerabilities during peacetime — before comfortable conditions can mask them.
Zhou Yuping: Electromagnetic Strikes Come Before the First Missile
Drawing on recent high-intensity conflicts, Zhou argued that adversaries do not open a war with kinetic strikes. They open it with invisible ones — high-intensity electronic warfare (EW) jamming, cyberattacks, GPS signal suppression, destruction of cell towers, severing of fiber-optic cables, and satellite communications jamming. By the time the first bomb falls, the electromagnetic environment is already severely hostile.
"What units lose first in combat is often not their firepower," Zhou said, "but the information advantage and communications convenience they had grown accustomed to in peacetime."
That dependence has taken root quietly inside Taiwan's military. Smartphones, messaging apps such as LINE, real-time location sharing, and cloud databases have become embedded in how front-line units manage routine administration — tools that improve daily efficiency but can become critical vulnerabilities the moment the battlefield environment changes.
Communications resilience, Zhou argued, has ceased to be a logistics footnote. It is now a direct determinant of whether a unit survives and continues to fight. And the threat compounds: peacetime convenience distorts command culture. When superiors can always reach subordinates instantly, micromanagement becomes the default, gradually stripping front-line officers of the habit of autonomous decision-making.
"A truly mature military," Zhou said, "should not be built on the assumption that it can always stay in contact, but on the ability to complete its mission even after contact is lost."
Dark Fiber and Decentralized Networks — Zhou's Comms Reform Blueprint
At the heart of Zhou's concern is a structural problem: significant portions of Taiwan's military communications infrastructure still depend on fiber-optic lines, server facilities, leased circuits, and switching equipment operated by commercial telecom providers. If an adversary targets those civilian nodes in its opening salvo, military communications could be crippled before a single shot is fired in response.
To break that dependency, Zhou proposed what he called a "peacetime-wartime decoupling" (平戰解耦) reform built around three interlocking structural changes.
First, the military should consider deploying dark fiber — unused optical fiber capacity — under a military-civilian separated architecture, with military-controlled encryption and transmission equipment. The design's critical component is a "kill switch" that can physically sever the military network from civilian telecom infrastructure on command, ensuring that when commercial nodes are compromised or destroyed, the damage cannot cascade into tactical networks.
Second, units should reduce single-point dependence on ground-based cables by building layered, automatically switching backup communications — combining military fiber, line-of-sight microwave and laser links, drone-based relay, and protected satellite channels across geostationary and low-earth orbits.
Third, at the tactical level — down to company and platoon — Zhou called for mobile ad-hoc wireless mesh networks, or MANET. Without a functioning base station, MANET nodes automatically form multi-hop communication links among vehicles and terminals, building a closed, high-bandwidth data network from the ground up.
Decoupling, Zhou stressed, does not mean severing all ties from civilian infrastructure in peacetime. The goal is a dual-mode architecture: shared resources for efficiency under normal conditions, with the ability to switch immediately into standalone military operation the moment conflict begins.
No Smartphones, No GPS — Eight Exercises Zhou Recommends
Beyond structural overhaul, Zhou urged Taiwan's military to push its exercises past simulated civilian internet outages — into what he called "no civilian communications" extreme drills, in which all smartphones, mobile networks, and commercial messaging platforms are prohibited for the duration.
The purpose is not hardship for its own sake. It is to verify whether military communications systems and command chains hold when their peacetime props are stripped away.
Zhou proposed eight training scenarios. Four address the electromagnetic battlefield directly: a comprehensive ban on all civilian communications tools; GPS-denial environments forcing navigation by map and compass; strict electromagnetic silence, known as EMCON, to shrink detectable electronic signatures; and live testing of military HF and VHF radio systems under heavy jamming. Four test physical and command resilience: rapid field wire deployment and maintenance; revival of tactical messenger runners for environments where electronics fail entirely; unannounced switches to backup systems — microwave, satellite, and MANET — to measure actual response times; and full-chain command evaluations from general headquarters down to squad level.
The underlying aim is to validate "mission command" (任務型指揮) — a philosophy in which units are thoroughly briefed on the commanding officer's intent before an operation, so they can continue to act and adapt even after communications are cut. "Mission command doesn't mean no command," Zhou said. "It means building shared understanding beforehand, so that units can act on the commander's intent even after contact is lost."
He identified "commander's intent" (指揮官意圖) and "decentralized execution" (去中心化執行) as the twin pillars of this approach — qualities that no-communications training is uniquely positioned to test, because they cannot be substituted when the network goes dark.
To institutionalize these practices, Zhou called for annual no-civilian-communications drills on a standardized cycle, permanent integration into Han Kuang and other major exercises, wartime service-level agreements with commercial telecom operators, and a lessons-learned database to track command and communications failures across exercise years.
Taiwan's military readiness, he argued, should no longer be measured only by marksmanship rates, equipment serviceability, and unit manning ratios. Communications resilience deserves recognition as a formal metric of combat capability. "Without reliable and resilient communications," Zhou warned, "even the most advanced weapons cannot translate into real combat power." （Related： Taiwan's Han Kuang Drill Exempts Southern Counties From Internet Blackout — to Protect Stock Traders ｜ Latest ）
