Pentagon plans two long-term staff inside Taiwan's defence ministry

Liberty Times and Mirror Media reported on 3 October 2026 that the United States Department of Defense intends to place personnel inside the headquarters of Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense for a long-term stay. Both accounts attribute the plan to senior military officials. They describe it as an expansion of a joint defence-ministry cooperation assessment, not as a new arms sale and not as a troop deployment announced by either government in its own name.

The budget figure in both reports is NT$470 million. The execution window they give is Republic of China fiscal years 115 to 117, which run from 2026 through 2028. The officials, as the two outlets relay them, said the assessment will be upgraded and enlarged. The Pentagon decision they describe is to send one representative from the policy under secretariat and one expert from the Institute for Defense Analyses, and to station both for the long term at the ministry headquarters in Taipei.

The stated job of those two people is policy coordination and assessment of combat power. Liberty Times said that would put American personnel inside the core of Taiwan's defence decision-making rather than in an outside liaison office. Mirror Media used the same distinction and said the representatives would take part directly in policy coordination and combat-power assessment. Neither outlet published a name, a start date, or a written order.

Liberty Times, in a Taipei dispatch by Lo Tien-pin timed at 10:37 on 3 October, also set the plan against cooperation that is already public. It said hundreds of American instructors, referred to as English teachers, are already with Taiwanese units. It said Pentagon officers and defence civilians have long worked inside the American Institute in Taiwan on arms sales and logistics, and that a Defense Innovation Unit liaison has sat at the institute on drone and technology supply chains. The new claim is that the two additional representatives would work in the ministry building itself.

Mirror Media published its version at 11:58 the same morning and updated it at 15:30. It points readers to the Liberty Times account for the background on the American Institute and the innovation-unit liaison, and it repeats the headquarters posting, the two sending organisations, and the NT$470 million figure as information from senior officers. The second report therefore corroborates the posting plan while relying on the same class of unnamed official and, for the earlier history, on the first newspaper.

Liberty Times added an analyst's reading that the arrangement would move cooperation from tactical training toward strategic wargaming and planning, and that long-term residency would track recent US statutes on Taiwan's resilience and annual defence authorisation. That passage is analysis in the newspaper, not a statement the reports attribute to the ministry. The paper also said future Han Kuang wargames and major procurement reviews could receive on-site advice, and that rules on classified sharing and information security would need to be tightened.

What is established, if the officials quoted by the two newsrooms are right, is a plan: two long-term American seats inside the defence ministry, one from the policy office and one from the Institute for Defense Analyses, under an assessment budgeted at NT$470 million for 2026 to 2028. What is not established is that anyone has taken up the post, that Taipei or Washington has confirmed the arrangement in public, or that a statute has been invoked by name in an official notice. The event is the 3 October disclosure of that staffing plan.

This report was produced through TaiwanDefence’s automated publishing system and includes links to its supporting sources.