When Wellington Koo (顧立雄) took over as Taiwan's defense minister in May 2024, the question circulating inside the military establishment was blunt: could a civilian actually run this institution? Two years on — through careful division of labor, a shift in military communication culture, and a sustained reform agenda — the answer appears to be yes.
Koo is the seventh civilian defense minister in the Republic of China's history, and the first to hold the post with genuine authority following the implementation of the Defense Organization Act and the National Defense Act, together known as the "Defense Two Laws." President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) appointed him from his previous role as Secretary-General of the National Security Council under former President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文). Unlike the typical civilian appointee, Koo entered the job already embedded in Taiwan-US security affairs, meeting with senior military officers even on weekends before he was formally sworn in.
Taiwan's Civilian Defense Ministers Have a Rocky History
The track record of his predecessors set a low bar. Since the Defense Two Laws came into force, only two other purely civilian ministers have served — and neither left a substantial legacy. Tsai Ming-hsien (蔡明憲), despite relevant credentials as former deputy NSC secretary-general and vice defense minister, took office during the caretaker cabinet period just before former President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) left office and served little more than 80 days. Yang Nien-tsu (楊念祖) was elevated from vice minister to minister as a crisis measure following the Hung Chung-chiu Incident — the 2013 death of a military conscript that triggered mass protests — only to resign six days later amid a plagiarism controversy.
Koo's trajectory has looked nothing like either of theirs. In his first media dinner after taking office, he laid out a strategic direction with unusual clarity: Taiwan would build "a large number of mobile, dispersed, precise, and lethal small things" — the core vocabulary of asymmetric warfare. That vision has since been institutionalized. He established the Advanced Defense Technology Task Force, known by its acronym DIO, and the military's current special budget proposals map directly onto the asymmetric doctrine he articulated from the outset.
General Mei's Early Backing Gave Koo a Critical Buffer
At Koo's first media roundtable after taking office, the seating arrangement was deliberately legible. Beside him sat General Mei Chia-shu (梅家樹), then Chief of the General Staff, providing a layer of institutional credibility for a minister whose authority was still untested. The division of labor was evident from the first exchange: Koo fielded questions on US military exchanges and arms sales — terrain where his background as a national security official gave him real standing — while Mei stepped in automatically whenever questions turned to combat operations and weapons systems. The arrangement worked because both men had already internalized their respective roles before the cameras turned on.
Two years later, the scaffolding has become less conspicuous — not because the generals are absent, but because Koo no longer needs the same kind of cover. At a recent roundtable that included Storm Media, senior staff officers were again seated nearby, but the dynamic had evolved. When asked about the direction of Taiwan's Han Kuang military exercises, Koo smiled and said, "This question is best suited for the Operations and Planning Office — it needs a standard answer," before deferring to the Vice Chief of the General Staff for Operations, Lt. Gen. Hou Chia-lun (侯嘉倫), with other senior officers adding further detail. The deference was deliberate — a sign not of weakness, but of a minister who now knows precisely where his authority ends and where his generals' begins.
Koo Has Quietly Reshaped How Taiwan's Military Speaks in Public
The shift is also visible in how the institution communicates outward. Under the old military culture — summed up in the phrase "I don't speak unless my superior does" — press interactions were tightly controlled and routinely opaque. Koo's presence has loosened that. When asked about US-Taiwan military exchanges, a subject Koo acknowledged he can address only up to a point given diplomatic constraints, the generals beside him now step in proactively, offering principled explanations that give reporters and the public a clearer picture of ground-level realities than they would have received before.
The political environment surrounding all of this remains testing. President Lai's government holds a minority in the Legislative Yuan — Taiwan's parliament — and military policy has run repeatedly into opposition roadblocks. Yet within those constraints, the armed forces have continued advancing on the reform agenda Koo set when he took office, and the working relationship between a civilian minister and his uniformed staff is genuinely different from what existed under his military-retiree predecessors.
Koo closed the interview on a personal note. He once served as an army transport platoon leader — a modest starting point for a man who now commands the entire defense establishment. "My life has taken a turn that brought me to a place I never imagined I would enter," he said. "Working alongside these outstanding colleagues, pursuing defense reform at the pace I believe it should go — this is the honor of my life. The opportunity to participate in national defense affairs as a civilian is extraordinarily rare. Even if I retire someday, I will never forget it." （Related： Exclusive | Taiwan Defense Chief: Drone Budget Deadlock Is Eroding Combat Power ｜ Latest ）
