A retired US Navy admiral recently revealed that the US has 500 troops in Taiwan, a major challenge to Beijing’s red lines related to the island.
Ret. Adm. Mark Montgomery made the disclosure at a House hearing on May 15, where he was arguing that the US should send more military personnel to Taiwan.
“We absolutely have to grow the joint training team in Taiwan. That’s a US team there that’s about 500 people now, it needs to be 1,000,” said Montgomery, who now works for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), an extremely hawkish think tank.
“If we’re going to give them billions of dollars in assistance, sell them tens of billions of dollars worth of US gear, it makes sense that we’d be over there training and working,” he added.
So far, the Pentagon has not confirmed the number, but due to the sensitivity of the matter, the US military typically offers few details about its operations in Taiwan.
After Washington severed diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1979, the US would still deploy a handful of military trainers to Taiwan. The small US presence was always an open secret but wasn’t officially confirmed until 2021, when then-President Tsai Ing-wen became the first Taiwanese leader to acknowledge US troops were on the island since 1979.
At the time of Tsai’s acknowledgment, only a few dozen US troops were believed to be on the island for training purposes. In 2023, media reports said the US was increasing its military presence to about 200 soldiers.
Last year, Taiwan confirmed that some of the US military trainers were deployed to Kinmen, a group of islands that are controlled by Taiwan but located just off the coast of mainland China.
The US has significantly increased military support for Taiwan in recent years despite constant warnings from China that the island is the “first red line” in US-China relations that must not be crossed.
