From staged pageant to stress test: how Taiwan rewrote its war games

A T112 assault rifle rested against a Wanhua storefront, but the rideshare passenger stepping out of the car did not know that. She had ordered an Uber. A military policeman in body armor told her the road was closed. She went around the block, ordered another car, and tried again. That is what an unscripted war drill looks like in Taipei.

Han Kuang, Taiwan's annual large-scale rehearsal for a Chinese invasion, has historically been a choreographed show: units in known places, on known schedules, performing known tasks for known audiences. The 2026 cycle, designated Han Kuang 42 by the Ministry of National Defense, is something different. Troops are operating inside the same neighborhoods where residents walk dogs, eat at barbecue restaurants near Songshan airport, and wait for rideshares. Business Insider's reporting from the exercise and Taiwan Plus's coverage of the expanded drill describe a striking new texture: not just troops in streets, but drills that have stopped telling troops what to do in those streets.

The change is the reform, and the reform is the mechanism. Taipei announced last year that it was moving Han Kuang away from staged performances toward unscripted exercises, a shift defense trade publication Overt Defense, in its August 18 wrap-up, said was intended to function as a stress test for both the military and the society hosting it. In the Wanhua cultural district, that meant reservists in the small hours of the morning building sandbag barricades and stringing barbed wire across a bridge that residents use to commute to work. In Kaohsiung, it meant Clouded Leopard armored vehicles trundling through residential blocks under late-morning heat while a delivery worker on a scooter dropped off mail behind the guard line.

Several things changed at once. Different units appeared in the same neighborhoods, so a reservist who had trained in a field was now maneuvering through alleys he did not know. Timing was deliberately variable: the Wanhua bridge-defense drill ran after midnight to limit disruption; the Kaohsiung residential drills ran in late-morning sun. Live ammunition was restricted to Taiwan's outlying islands; urban drills used blanks, smoke grenades, and wrecked cars. The script was the absence of one. A reservist who had expected to perform a known task found himself, instead, deciding where to put a barricade while a barbecue diner stepped outside to watch blanks fired from the alley across the street. A police cruiser responding to a noise complaint pulled up to a position held by troops who had not been told to expect it. Both groups improvised.

The All-Out Defense Mobilization Agency, the Taiwanese agency that runs the parallel civil-defense track, published a 2026 Urban Resilience notice listing Air Defense Exercises as a separate but coupled track. The Taipei Times reported on July 23 that the August civil drills will be closely tied to Han Kuang for the first time, meaning that the people ordering rideshares around Wanhua barricades in August are the same people who will be told where to shelter in September. The society is being asked to be a rehearsal partner, not a backdrop.

That is the question the unscripting raises, and it is the one a cold reader should leave with. If the drills work, they harden a model of how a free society can rehearse the worst without becoming a garrison state: reservists in body armor blocking a road while a rideshare reroutes around them, and the whole system still functioning. If they do not, the gap between performance and reality will show up in a real crisis, and the cost of that gap will be measured in minutes no one rehearsed. The Taipei government's stated bet is that the people on the street are part of the test. The civilians who walked their dogs through the Wanhua intersection did not sign up for the experiment. They are in it anyway.

The next civil-defense cycle begins in September.