Taiwan Live-Fires Tanks on Strait Beach to Rehearse China Defense

The place was not incidental. Penghu sits in the Taiwan Strait, the island chain any cross-strait assault would have to cross, seize, or neutralize.⁠2⁠3 That morning the military used Wude Beach to simulate repelling a Chinese rapid air and amphibious landing assault, in what Taiwanese military sources called a key-area fire annihilation drill.⁠2⁠3⁠9⁠11 In plain terms: pretend the enemy is coming over the beach and from the sky at the same time, then kill that landing with everything you have.

What Taiwan brought to that strip of sand was old armor wired into a layered kill web. M60A3 tanks fired 105mm rounds at the shoreline.⁠3⁠4⁠9 Around them, according to Taiwanese reporting, the drill integrated 155mm and 105mm howitzers, 120mm and 81mm mortars, 50-caliber, T74 and M249 machine guns, drones, and T91 rifles.⁠9⁠11 The sequence ran through air-defense engagement, security force combat, and anti-air-landing operations phases, a multi-layered firepower network built to meet different parts of the same attack.⁠9⁠11 Machine guns built an anti-air fire net while tanks maneuvered against the landing force.⁠9

The sky above Wude did not get everything that had been planned. A Stinger missile live-fire that had been on the schedule was canceled at the last minute because poor sea conditions prevented target placement, and troops rehearsed that portion without live fire.⁠11 That matters because any description that suggests every planned air-defense weapon fired live overstates what happened. The tanks fired, the howitzers fired, the mortars and machine guns fired, but the Stinger portion did not.⁠9⁠11

Taiwan framed the morning as deterrence by demonstration. The military described the scenario as simulating repelling a Chinese air landing assault on strategically vital Penghu County.⁠2⁠3 Chinese-language military sources described it as countering island-seizure intent by the People's Liberation Army and showing determination to defend Penghu.⁠8 The Penghu Defense Command, identified as the First Operational Zone, said it will continue to train according to threat and defense needs.⁠9 There are no verbatim Ministry of Defense spokesperson statements in the available reporting, only that command-level line and the drills themselves.⁠9

The audience was local as well as military. Observers invited to Penghu included Taipower's Jianshan plant director Li Feng-chun and local village heads, who described the firing as very shocking and impressive.⁠11 A Penghu resident quoted by public broadcaster PTS said, "Not bad, fired very accurately."⁠8 Another local witness gave a thumbs-up to the troops' performance.⁠8 For people who live around those beaches and airstrips, accuracy is not an abstraction. It is whether the guns that would defend their homes can actually hit.

What happened at Wude was only one strand of what Taiwan tested that day. For the first time, Taiwan deliberately throttled mobile internet for about 30 minutes across central Taiwan during the war games.⁠2⁠5⁠10 On the main island, drills that day included chemical-attack decontamination scenarios in Hualien and field repair of damaged fiber-optic cables in Taoyuan.⁠8 Taken together, the picture is of an exercise that no longer treats invasion as only tanks and ships. It treats it as poisoned air, blacked-out phones, and cut cables, with infantry and engineers expected to work through all of it.

The M60A3 itself tells a story about Taiwan's position. It is an older American-designed tank, upgraded and kept firing, now asked to hold a beach against a far larger and more modern adversary. Taiwan's answer on Wude was not that one old tank can stop an invasion. It was that tanks plus artillery plus mortars plus machine guns plus drones plus riflemen, firing on rehearsed lines, might make a landing so costly that Beijing thinks twice. Whether that logic deters is not answered in the reporting, and neither is whether these Penghu rehearsals expand into wider strait maneuvers.⁠2⁠3⁠9⁠11 Also missing from the sources: the exact number of tank rounds fired, named unit commanders, and any reaction from Beijing.