The National Army uses the Taiwan Tactical Network (TTN) and the Force Awareness Application Kit (TAK) to establish a common image and decentralized management energy for ground forces. However, legislators questioned the concerns about specification binding and institutional risks, and froze the budget of more than 120 million yuan. The Army Command warned that if the budget is frozen, it will make it impossible to provide immediate support among combat, combat support and reserve forces, which will be detrimental to the tactical operations and application of each unit. There is indeed an urgent need for related funds, and it hopes that the Legislative Yuan will agree to unfreeze it.
Kuomintang Legislators Ma Wenjun and Niu Xuting, and People's Party Legislator Wang Anxiang recently questioned during the budget review that Taiwan's tactical network and force awareness application suite and AI infrastructure are highly overlapping with the existing ATAK. If only commercial interfaces, clouds, and specific communications are used, there may be concerns about specification binding. Moreover, if a large number of simultaneous promotions are carried out without rigorous verification, it may create a major institutional risk of "packaging military regulations with commercial regulations and replacing combat capabilities with procurement." Therefore, the proposal is to freeze 10% (122.652 million yuan) of the budget and require the Ministry of National Defense to submit a written report and obtain approval before spending.
However, since the beginning of this session, there have been more than 150 budget unfreezing bills pending for the Ministry of National Defense, none of which have yet to be unfrozen, and the National Defense Committee convening committee has not yet arranged an agenda for unfreezing the budget.
In response to the legislators' questions, the Army stated in a written report on the budget unfreezing that the entire case adopted the principle of open bidding and the most favorable bid award to purchase 4/5G terminal equipment, which will be mainly deployed in ground combat, support and reserve forces.
In terms of information security, the Army pointed out that the TTN cloud architecture complies with the specifications of the National Institute of Standards and Technology and focuses on device management (MDM), network access (firewall, VPN and zero trust) and identity verification control (multi-factor authentication and permission settings) to ensure information security and enhance information security resilience; and the version of the TAK suite used by the national army is a military version, which has an encryption security zero trust mechanism.
The Army further explained that although TAK has a built-in translation program, it can only translate text messages and has no voice translation function. The Ministry of National Defense is preparing to build a field voice system that can be installed on TAK devices to provide real-time voice translation in multiple languages. This is different from the commercially available manual input translation mode and is beneficial. Improve the efficiency of real-time communication on the battlefield; TTN adopts a common data format and a multi-interface communication architecture, which can integrate information such as sensors, open source information and unmanned vehicles, and combine it with commercial 4/5G, broadband radio and satellite networks to establish a diverse transmission network without the concerns of specification binding.
The Army pointed out that since last year, TAK devices have been deployed in batches by ground troops at the brigade, battalion, and company levels for tactical use, and have been used in conjunction with various annual exercises and disaster relief actual combat verification. The exercise experience will be compiled and provided to the Ministry of National Defense for reference as a basis for software improvement and research and improvement.
Finally, the Army emphasized that the budget of this project is needed for communications, electronics and information management. If the budget is frozen, it will make it impossible to provide immediate support among combat, combat support and reserve forces, which will be detrimental to the tactical operations and application of various forces. There is indeed an urgent need for related funds.
