Lu Sheng 2 attackers reach Hsinchu's Nanliao as Taiwan's M1A2T brigade prepares to strike back

The attacking force in the Taiwan army's Lu Sheng 2 exercise pushed north to Nanliao in Hsinchu on Sunday, Oct. 18, the fifth day of the drill, according to the United Daily News. The paper reported that the advance by the red force, the 564th Brigade, followed the exercise's planned adjudication, while the defending 269th Brigade, which fields a company of M1A2T tanks, had fought a step-by-step delaying action since the Dajia River in central Taiwan and would counterattack as the situation allowed.

The defence ministry said that army corps headquarters are taking part in the exercise. The southern 8th Army Corps is commanding the 564th Brigade as the attacking side, while the northern 6th Army Corps is leading the 269th Brigade as the defenders. The annual Han Kuang exercise is built around fighting along an east-west axis, whereas Lu Sheng pits forces against each other on a north-south line.

The 10-day exercise began on Wednesday and runs around the clock, Taiwan News reported, citing the Military News Agency. Artillery units have rehearsed the full fire-support chain, from finding targets and handling requests to calculating firing data. Tank crews practised freeing and repairing a CM11 tank whose track had been damaged by obstacles, reconnaissance platoons flew drones for aerial surveillance, and engineers laid steel hedgehogs, concertina wire, concrete barriers and blast walls to slow the enemy.

Over the first five days, the two brigades moved from a standoff across the Dajia River to a rapid northward drive by the 564th, which seized a key pass that the 269th had already deployed to defend and where it should have held the terrain advantage, the paper said. It noted that the defenders had not used that ground to destroy or stall the attackers before the red force reached Nanliao.

Officials told the paper that Lu Sheng 2 deliberately turns the defensive scenario into a north-south attack-and-defence problem in which one side is placed at an advantage and the other at a disadvantage, to train the defending side to complete its mission anyway. They said the moves into Miaoli and Nanliao were the planned outcome of the umpires' rulings.

For the army, the officials said, the 564th Brigade's task is to test how quickly forces from the south can move north as reinforcements. Seen from the red force's side, the drive also lets planners estimate how long Chinese troops who had landed in central or southern Taiwan might need to reach the flank of the northern defences. TVBS reported that the 8th Army Corps units had made the long road march without tank transporters, which military observers took as a sign of high equipment readiness.

The 269th Brigade, according to the officials, is testing how the northern corps can pull together its new tank strike units to secure its flank and how follow-on forces would support the brigade in destroying the attackers. In the second half of the exercise the brigade is expected to counterattack southward, testing the speed of its M1A2T tanks, recording data on long-distance resupply and practising the kind of sustained operations that the United States has urged.

Wang Pei-lu, a former instructor at the army college of the National Defense University, told the paper that the ground around Nanliao favours the defender. The Hukou plateau on one side is hard to attack, and nearby heights overlook the area south of Hsinchu city. He said that if those hills fell, the attackers would break into the Taoyuan and Zhongli plain, the decisive ground for the northern theatre, and he expected the 269th to launch its counterattack from Nanliao.

The army said the force-on-force training would help it assess command and control, how units respond to the unexpected and how well they coordinate, and that it would use the results to refine its training for defensive operations, according to Taiwan News.