Taiwan Launches Five-Day "Immediate Combat Readiness" Drill as Beijing Steps Up Pressure

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A Drill Built for Realism

Taiwan's Ministry of National Defence announced on Sunday that its "Immediate Combat Readiness Exercise" will run from Monday to Friday this week. The exercise is part of a broader change in how Taiwan trains its forces: away from scripted, ceremonial-style war games and toward scenarios built to resemble an actual attack as closely as possible.

Soldiers, sailors and airmen will rehearse the jump from normal peacetime duties to wartime deployment, using real troops, real equipment and live command structures rather than simulations on paper. The ministry said the focus is on familiarising units at every level with combat conditions during the critical first phase of a crisis, and on tightening logistics, battlefield preparation and joint command between the different branches of the military.

One scenario now shaping Taiwan's training is unusually direct: a routine Chinese exercise near the island suddenly turning into a real attack. Building drills around that possibility marks a shift from the more theoretical planning of past years.

Beijing Sends Another Wave of Aircraft

The announcement landed on the same day Taiwan's defence ministry reported 21 Chinese military aircraft operating near the island, including J-16 fighters, KJ-500 early-warning planes and Y-20 refuelling tankers. Nineteen of them flew into the airspace southwest of Taiwan and on into the Western Pacific, which Beijing described as long-distance training over open water. Taiwan said its own forces tracked and responded to the activity, using the standard language it applies to nearly daily encounters with the Chinese military.

China claims democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has never ruled out using force to bring the island under its control, despite the objections of Taiwan's government. Taiwan and independent military trackers say Chinese aircraft and ships now operate around the island almost every day, a level of activity that barely registered a decade ago.

A Military in Transition

This week's drill follows other recent signs that Taiwan is reworking its defence posture. Earlier in June, the island's forces test-fired the US-made HIMARS rocket system into the Taiwan Strait for the first time, a system that has become widely known through its use by Ukraine against Russian forces. According to reporting by the South China Morning Post, it marked the first time the system had been aimed toward the Chinese mainland, underscoring how Taipei is leaning on mobile, hard-to-target weapons to disrupt any attempted landing before it reaches shore.

China, for its part, closed out 2025 with one of its largest displays of force to date. Open-source analysis of the "Justice Mission 2025" exercise in late December found it covered a wider area than any Chinese war game staged near Taiwan since 2022, simulating a full air and sea blockade of the island.

What Comes Next: Han Kuang in August

This week's exercise is widely seen as a building block toward Taiwan's largest annual war games, the Han Kuang exercises, expected in August. Reporting from the Taipei Times indicates the defence ministry restructured its annual training calendar this year specifically so that shorter, realistic drills like this one feed into the bigger exercise rather than standing apart from it.

Defence officials have also said this year's Han Kuang drills will, for the first time, fold Taiwan's military intelligence units into tabletop war games and adopt several US-style rehearsal methods aimed at sharpening battlefield coordination, according to Focus Taiwan. The live-fire phase has typically run about ten days in recent years.

For now, this week's "Immediate Combat Readiness Exercise" offers an early look at how seriously Taiwan is taking the prospect that a Chinese drill could one day become something far more dangerous.

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Sources

1. Reuters – "Taiwan to stage five days of combat readiness drills" – https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/taiwan-stage-five-days-combat-readiness-drills-2026-06-21/
2. Taipei Times – "Combat readiness drills to start next week" – https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2026/06/20/2003859413
3. Focus Taiwan – "2026 Han Kuang drills test key U.S. military rehearsals: Source" – https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202604120006
4. South China Morning Post – "What launch of Himars rockets towards Taiwan Strait says about Taipei's battle plans" – https://www.scmp.com/news/china/military/article/3357332/what-launch-himars-rockets-towards-taiwan-strait-says-about-taipeis-battle-plans
5. The Diplomat – "China's Taiwan Drills Are Crossing a New Line" – https://thediplomat.com/2026/01/chinas-taiwan-drills-are-crossing-a-new-line/

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