Sea Control - Sea Control 600: Civil Defense in Taiwan

Episode Date: March 31, 2026

Links:  https://thecultureshack.blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/updated-resilience-roadmap- 2.0-.pdf https://blog.schee.info/2024/11/04/civil-defense-in-taiwan-its-not-just-one-or-two-groups/ https://blog.schee.info/2025/10/12/zero-based-mobilization-a-rapid-assessment-of-the- recent-hualien-flood-disaster-and-the-modernization-of-taiwans-mobilization-systems/ https://blog.schee.info/2023/05/28/disinformation-is-an-information-environment- problem/ https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-10-27/taiwan-ham-radio-amateurs- civil-defense   Bio: TH Schee is a Taiwanese tech entrepreneur, lecturer and policy advisor for civil defense, licensed amateur radio operator, and search and rescue practitioner.

Ahoy, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. I'm your host, Brian Kerg, and our guest today is T.H. Shi, a Taiwanese tech entrepreneur and lecturer in civil defense. Today, we'll be discussing civil defense in Taiwan. As a reminder, all views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. Department of Defense, Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense, or any other organization with which we are affiliated. TH, welcome aboard Sea Control. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your professional background? Thanks for the invitation. I'm TH Shi. I'm from Taiwan. I'm currently based in Taipei. I'll start with my background a little bit. I was a college dropout back in the days,

last century and then i volunteered to join the navy but as a conscript so i got an early draft there and then i basically work in a wider internet sector for the past two decades so that's what i do most of the time but then uh because uh i had a natural interest in policy discussions among stakeholders. So I had been lucky enough to get a lot of invitation from government agency to serve as an advisor to their own agency. Excellent. No, thank you very much for that background. And it sounds like you are the exact right person we want to talk about this subject. So let's begin with the basics for our listeners. Can you begin by explaining to us what civil defense is and why it is particularly important for taiwan i think that the term is

a little bit tricky because it sometimes give us a memory or call back the memory of a cold war era so during cold war era not just in the u.s but in taiwan as well it was a common thing that people would work on is basically uh like organized efforts by both government and communities to protect civilians from military attacks. At that day, it's a nuclear attack, right? Natural disasters and other large-scale emergencies. So it's mostly about preparedness planning, the first stage. Second, early warning system, you know, when there's an air raid sirens, you have to, you know, those people have to push the button and alert the public within the community. And there's a public education part and the protection of infrastructure

for some part of the nation, yes. So that's what civil defense is like. But I think I'm saying but because in Taiwan, because we had one of the longest martial law era in the world during the last century. So when you mention the term civil defense, it brings us some very bad memories for us Because it's all about government having official civil defense personnel watching civilians in their neighborhood.

Basically, it's like a military government back in the days. So I think the civil defense, when you mention the term to different generations, not just in Taiwan, but in this part of the world, people feel that there's different images that will bring back different members. And they would have different expectations out of any plans that are put forward by the government. Yes. Great background and really appreciate the nuance you described in terms of what the term itself, how that can elicit different assumptions or reactions, depending on who's hearing it and who's saying it. So thank you so much for that. In reading the literature about civilian defense in Taiwan, personally, I am struck by how often I come across the theme of national resilience. It's a key theme that also runs through the 2025 Taiwan National Defense Report.

So could you please discuss the importance of national resilience and how civil defense training reinforces national resilience? I think that the term is relatively new, not just to the public audience, most of the population. It's also very new to different government agencies, because back in the days, we didn't call it the whole society national resilience program. That's sort of a term. We don't use that kind of term. So I think it's an effort by the government, which tries to coordinate from top down, from top to bottom. because the current ruling government here has a minority seat in the parliament. So there are a lot of limitations

in whether the government would can or would do because you have to act by laws, right? So I think the put out of the turn is more like you have to prepare for an imminent threat coming from a certain adversary. But for most people in Taiwan, because we are a natural-prone island, we do have the capacity and the capability to react in a certain emergency, whether it's natural disasters or man-made disasters or a war contingency, basically. But there's no overall overarching understanding or framework to get everyone together on the same boat. It wasn't there in the law.

So I think the government just tried to spearheading the whole thing by, first, giving people an expectation that this is not just a military stuff. Second, you do have a place to contribute So I think it's a very good start For the government to use the term And I think it's a little bit tricky Because when you talk about civil defense Or the national response frameworks Here in Taiwan

It's very fractured So for civil defense It's coordinated by the National Police Agency It's not even the National Fire Agency So people would be shocked Why is this under the police? Under the law enforcement Because it was a legacy of Cold War era

And it hasn't changed very much So for now, even though you could not change The legal restriction that's put upon us But there are some programs that you could do Because some real capability and capacity could develop out of, maybe navigate around the limitations of legal restrictions. So that's how it got started and try to having everybody to have the same expectation of what the government is doing right now and what you could have contributed to the whole movement. I would call it more like a movement. Yes. Great. Thank you very much. And it's really important that you explain that nuance as far as the architecture, the framework, and again, some of the sensitivities around which agency or department might be organizing this. So that's really good background. And on that note, most Western audiences who have any familiarity with the subject of civil defense in Taiwan, they probably have limited awareness of those groups.

Maybe only a couple working in the area, such as the Kuma Academy, which tends to spring up a lot in much of this reporting. But from reading your work, I understand that the civil defense landscape is much broader and more diverse than this. So could you please discuss the many other organizations or communities working on civil defense in Taiwan? I'll start with a few numbers so people get a feel. First, we got around 20,000 firefighters. Official firefighters. We do have professional firefighters. So it's very centralized.

They go to centralized police training, firefighter training academy. So everybody, if you really want to be a firefighter, you have to go through that pipeline, training pipeline. So you got 20,000 of them, right? And there are volunteer firefighters, much like the situation in the US there are around 50,000 volunteer firefighters

so that part comes to a very large part of first response thing because these people they all belong to different groups for example there are like mega religious groups here

in Taiwan which I mentioned very often it's called it's more like a philanthropic group they do have It's a Buddhist charity, a foundation. They have presence in more than 100 countries in the world. So I think these people and these volunteers, firefighters, their groups, they don't get mentioned in Western literature or news

because they mostly work on the operational side of response. So they don't do policy stuff. They probably don't have to engage with the outside world. They probably don't engage with Western journalists at all. They might not have the will to engage with the think tankers, even here, because they are busy. They're busy doing all the stuff. And I'll give another shocking number.

The fire squad that I'm very familiar with in my community, my hometown uh right now uh they have uh around 10 000 fire dispatches per year for a squad team of 65 people that's shocking that's shocking think about that you have like 30 more than 30 dispatches every day for the whole year so they do need support from a lot of groups, especially grassroots groups out there. So if there's only a few groups mentioned in the Western literature coming out after

2018, well, how should the society function? Just think about it. It's a very logical step that you do have a lot of existing groups out there. They are working diligently to support and put out a fire, search and rescue missions, or

getting drawn people out of the field, or doing paramedics. So I think the reason why they don't get mentioned Because they just don't want to get interviewed At all So that's I think for a lot of people who want to dive deeper Into the civil defense thing

If they stayed in Taiwan for more than Like a month Not just two weeks You talk to operators You talk to practitioners You will know, oh, well folks in Taiwan And these groups in Taiwan Even though they might not have English websites

Or social media accounts But they do have the capability They may not have the capacity In a war contingency But they do have the capability already And I think that's the most interesting And amazing part of Taiwan You have groups out there

Who do very well education stuff To raise awareness among young people Like the groups that you mentioned like two groups are basically kuma academy a full alliance but there are more groups out there doing real stuff so it's like boots on the ground yes that's uh very insightful and uh for someone like me that just gives me many lines of inquiry that i'm eager to start hunting down uh but i encourage our listeners as well to do some of their own exploration and uh and and seek outside sources um to dig a bit deeper on this very important topic so i'm going to put you on the

spot for a second, because you personally facilitate some civil defense training. So if you don't mind, can you share with us what type of training you focus on and who the target audience is for that training? The first is a policy brief. I do a lot of policy briefs for different organizations, because first, I do write policy papers for some government agencies. and second i'm a practitioner i'm a volunteer lifeguard i am a certified fema cert instructor the u.s system so i think i i i've been uh also i've been unlucky that i have met uh personally endured several biggest earthquakes here in taiwan uh partner with the local uh SAR groups to rescue people out of scene, like

broken buildings. So for me, I think I see the gap that the policymakers here, they don't really have the chance to talk to those first responders on the ground. I see the need to engage with those people from a policy side of view so i do a lot of policy brief not just to government but to those uh emerging groups out there you need to know what's already there uh in order to develop better you know plan like

organization development the second is uh developing new capability it's a digital world it's not like 20 years ago 20 years ago you don't have a fast broadband so everybody have to use paper maps, right, in the search and rescue missions. But now you do have your mobile phones, you do have satellites there who could take pictures of a wildfire,

right? You have thermal cameras on drones. So there are new capabilities out of the new digital development program. So I'm supporting a few groups to develop new capabilities with regard to a digital part of their capability and the third thing that i do is

scaling capacity so it's more like internal proposing some organization structure change to accommodate the better or the newcomers who would like to volunteer for the organizations and the fourth thing that I do it's probably a little bit weird but that's my main interest maybe not the main thing that I do for a living but it's a tactical fitness

now people here it's a mountainous island those mountains are pretty formidable if you go there you need to have a very good fitness level just to move things around

just to respond in a very wet and windy climate and high mountains. So I do technical fitness, investing in gyms, right? Yeah, just to get people together to be strong and have a faith in themselves. Yeah, for listeners who are not familiar with the terrain or the topography of Taiwan, you're in for a surprise if you think you're going to move around quickly. I've climbed a couple of those mountains myself, and they are no joke. They kick my butt. But your conversation about all the things you're mapping together and connecting the capacity and capability, that's actually a perfect segue to another important question, which is one of mobilization.

So mobilization of Taiwanese civilians in response to disaster is also important to this area. And you've previously assessed what you call zero-based mobilization in light of the Hualien flood disaster and recommended certain changes to Taiwan's mobilization system as a result. So could you please discuss your assessment of this disaster response and what you would change for zero-based mobilization? There are certain limitations to Taiwan's capability to respond in a crisis. The first, those official, you know, like official personnels under the control of the government, they do have a very good interface with government agencies. The average age, the median age of those people is more than 53. It's an aging society here in Taiwan. So we got more than 20 percent of population over the age of 65 already.

So for those people who are into those response plans, they do have a role. Their average age is 53. It's a bad thing, right? The median age of a Taiwanese society is 48. More than 48. It's really bad compared to the U.S. It's only 38 or 39, which is a very stable country. So why I came up with that kind of proposal or concept of proposals is that during the Hualien flood,

maybe a lot of audience are not familiar with that. It's one of the most watched natural disaster in Taiwan's history last year, at the end of last year. And because of the information out of the flood, it was really everywhere on the internet. So a lot of young people under the age of 30, they volunteered to support disaster relief. And we got around 150,000 young volunteers willing to, you know, sacrifice their vacations.

They go there, they dig holes, they try to search for people. They try to move things around, feeding out sandbags so they could block the water streams from the river. and these people are coming out of nowhere the government doesn't know them the biggest charity groups or HADR, humanitarian

assistance groups here, they don't know them, they don't know how to interact with those young people, but you see there's a big natural disaster, young people are willing to support, but you have no

structure, you have no pathway for them to engage them or assimilate them into your official system whether it's training or a part of the get them to be part of the charity

group so they could donate some money for your groups I think it was a wake up call for a lot of people here so that's why I came out of the mobilization concept zero basis because

just like I mentioned earlier, there are a lot of restrictions in law whether what you could do what you could not do as a government agency or as a disaster relief group but these people, they just

rush to help how do you accommodate them? There needs to be a certain rethink in how government plan out all these beautiful mobilization plan which hasn't been practiced for the last 40 years

and it's probably only practiced within certain groups of reserves which amounts only maybe a hand of like 1,000 people, that's all but in a major

contingency scenario you probably have to mobilize way more than that number of people So I think it's a wake-up call for a lot of people. We need to develop a concept to get everybody going forward. And that's another good move into a follow-on topic, which is tools by which you could mobilize all of those people, and some could be involved with key technology. So you have also spent a lot of time working on some of those key technologies that could facilitate civil defense, including tactical awareness kit or TAC, as well as the role of amateur radio. So could you discuss these as well as any other technologies that you think will be critical for civil defense or mobilization?

The biggest challenge is that we don't have a common operational picture, even among government agencies. It's hard. You have to invest a lot of tech to get everybody to have the same understanding of the field, right? It's a difficult thing. It's a very difficult thing. So back in the days, we were saying that using ham radio is all about telling where you are. It's all about 50% of the traffic on ham radio. It's all about where you are in the mountains. you have to it's it's very hard to just to pinpoint you and locate those dismounted resources you know using ham radio but we first we do have a lot of mountains and we do have more than

quite maybe 8 000 radio ham radio operators licensed operator uh in in a tiny island so that's more than enough but it's more like a cold war era technology so uh people under the age of 55 here tend to forget oh we do have a ham radio so you don't have to go to the internet like most people here well it's a very savvy

digital savvy society so people will use Facebook but all those traffic will be routed through cloud service which might not located within Taiwan so basically you need to talk to your neighbors

just across the wall you have to go the traffic have to go through like maybe japan tokyo u.s west seattle and probably all the way back to taiwan because the internet route is this how internet routes works most of the time but you do have the old proven technology that you don't have to go through the cloud now environment and while the internet it happened many times that their disruption happened to submarine cables connecting taiwan to the outside world but in a you know when the power went down you have to talk to your neighbors maybe a few kilometers away and radio is the best thing you could do it's going to be on uh vhf or if you want to go shoot long range it could be

using a high hf uh frequency as well so i'm just uh for this part for the m2 radio part i'm trying to breach those uh uh cold war daddies with the young guys who really want to find out alternatives of a communication method and for tech is uh i think because uh uh we uh read in the news that the ministry here is uh implementing tech as well it's a new concept for the military here especially the armies uh the army so uh we for me i think it's uh it's better to to have the same capability on the civilian side of the world because otherwise maybe in certain scenarios you have to talk to the military they have to pass information to you you need to be familiar with the same stack of technology like you know if you're using

computer i have to use a computer if you talk in english i have to talk in english that's basically the idea of why TAC the Tactical Awareness Kit the civilian version is so important to first responders here so I think that's two of the

most important tech that I'm currently working on and it's all about communication and having a common operational picture among stakeholders Great rundown on all that and uh while you and i and our age group might be some of the only people who are aware of

or are able to operate on ham radio i have to plug it a little bit more here in the united states we have a number of organizations uh civil organizations that in response to a number of disasters or environmental challenges you know internet is out cell phone towers are trashed and suddenly these organizations um aries and mars uh these folks will get involved and then they're passing traffic at key c2 nodes and this old old technology is what's is what's saving the day because it's the only thing that can be relied upon uh in such an environment so uh yeah i want to i want to double tap that one but uh let's talk about uh a slightly different focus because this podcast is is simsec the center for international maritime security sea control

podcast uh so i want to focus a bit on the maritime and i would say given the maritime focus of any contingency impacting Taiwan, be it a natural disaster or something else, the nature of Taiwan as an island country will be very impactful on how civilians must respond. So could you discuss how maritime conditions of a contingency could shape the civil defense actions that Taiwanese must be prepared to take? I'll start with a topic that people mention most. it's a disruption of submarine cables because they, you know, on the seabed and we have, officially we do have like 14 submarine cables

connected to Taiwan to the outside world. And if there's certain disruption to certain sections of that submarine cables, people will feel that, right? Because you're connecting like a website in Japan or in Hong Kong, it's getting very slow. People will complain about that. But just a year ago, there was no official disruption information, like a bulletin board that would tell the wider audience of the population that, oh, there's a disruption happened to that section of submarine cable.

Only enterprise customers of the telcos, they would know the severity of those incidents. So for the past few years, there were a lot of disruptions happening. Probably we could call it a maritime domain because it's where the people would feel the most. It will impact their living, daily lives. The government didn't have any plan or intention, based on my understanding, to get those. put out in a notice which is very unfriendly for most people to locate

the information. So there's a guy basically a network engineer. He was fed up with all those fuck of disruptions. So he submitted a website trying to use the crawlers on the internet to parse information from different government agencies even telcos to put out an unofficial submarine uh disrupting you know a website so people will get noticed and of course it's not

correct because of the information put out by the government on the website is of an incomplete but people because there's a oh now there's a very friendly mother website out there people subscribe to that notice and it creates a bit of confusion for everybody and created a bit of a pressure for the government so i'm using this case uh to say that because uh uh for the the people of taiwan um this in this island it's very hard to understand or to get a feel what's happening out there in the high sea or just along the coast back in martial law eras if you live in like offshore islands of taiwan you have the ability to swim more than 500 meters in the ocean you will be blacklisted

the government actively discourage people you know like the island of Kiman and Mazu if you were there you're able to swim like 500 meters you'll be listed, you'll be flagged because you have that kind of

I don't know, it sounds like a joke, right so there's a very big gap for people that if anything happens out there say the Chinese Coast Guard harassing fishermen here. You wouldn't get any information out there.

So I think that's a very big gap right now. Also, there's a lot of maritime intrusions by the PLA forces, whether it's their PLA Navy or their Coast Guard or their maritime militias out there. We don't get much information So I think this is the field

That needs to be addressed Because people need People to have the right to know What's out there If it turns out to be a black sheep moment Like the old days in Japan It's way too late It's way too late

So I think that's how So I think it's bad, right? It's really bad right now. Maybe I shouldn't be that pessimistic about this field, but it's a field that we really need to work on to inform the public the level of threats that you are facing right now. I mean, I wouldn't describe it as skepticism.

I would describe it as your realistic and honest assessment, and so we're grateful for that. I'm concerned about potentially being blacklisted for uh swimming uh but no i mean i would say that's shocking that's just insightful to understand uh some of the uh attempts at control that were imposed on the population during during that era so so thank you for that bit um so the that bit of defense is is also very important to this conversation so the role of civil defense is gaining traction across the wider defense community and you've also worked with programs at the institute for national defense and security

research in Taiwan, as well as the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Hawaii. So could you discuss your experience of the emerging role of civil defense in things like education centers like that, and how you see the subject growing in organizations like this in the future? Just like I mentioned earlier, there's a strong movement. I wouldn't call it strong, but there are quite a few number of young people willing to devote or willing to invest in this part and some are even seeking career to be uh firefighters so i think it's a good sign because only five years ago nobody would care about civil defense

at all because the government would take control of everything it's a it's basically a nanny state here so the firefighters the police they have to go through the centralized training system academy and all those uh uh it's it's it's very much centralized uh capacity for the for the government uh but now you you have you you are getting an influx of new people coming in or even old people who you know got the bad memories of the third taiwan street crisis in 1995 1996 like like what i have uh you would like to invest more in that part so uh the first thing that i see there's a strong need is the standardization

of training so there are a lot of people out there they say I could train you do they really have the certification or the experience enough to train you or are they just trying to ride on the waves

of this new momentum they try to get a piece of business out of these young people because a lot of young people, they just don't have the experience of living through those hard times. So I think standardization, that thing could be facilitated or required by the government, certain government agencies. So that's the one thing that needs to be addressed. And that's the thing that I propose most for even with emerging fields like information environment.

We often talk about disinformation problems. It will hamper people's understanding of the real situation out there. You see a lot of AI-generated information, deepfakes out there. But the problem is probably not so much about fighting disinformation. The problem is more like how to get the correct information when you need to respond. That piece of information, you don't need broadband, that kind of bandwidth. to react in a certain emergency. You only need a very tiny piece of correct information

to respond responsibly and effectively in that environment. So I think that part is what I learned the most because I've gone through trainings of old days training, standardization of training, and that kind of idea need to apply to the digital field as well. So that's what I propose. or try to bridge the new world with the old world yes that's what i do most and i think that's something that taiwan as people here has to pay more attention to that part

well that's about as good a place as i could have hoped for to uh to for you to stick the landing and wrap up this episode so i'll just ask one more question finally th is there some place where listeners should find you online or your work? And what else are you working on these days? I do I survive the social media

apocalypse. Well, which means I still write a blog on the same domain for the past 26 years. But mostly, I'm sorry, mostly in Chinese. But there are some articles in English. It's on the same domain.

So if you Google THC, you will see my blog. I was the first batch of so-called bloggers here in the greater China region. So I write about tech and policy. I've been doing that for the past 25 years. So if you go there, check the website, there are some articles in English. You'll see what I'm up to. And I'm updating that not like one post per year. i have that i get one post per week great i'll definitely add that in the show notes and i will

challenge our listeners if they are not uh fluent in mandarin to find a friend or other ability to uh to get savvy on that stuff so they can enjoy all your incredible work so uh th let me just wrap this up by saying yeah thank you so much for joining us and sharing your insights today and we wish you fair winds and following seas and to listeners bravo zulu for tuning in and We'll see you next time. We'll be right back.