Taiwan's military conducted a blockade exercise on August 13 in Yilan County simulating the sealing of the Hsuehshan Tunnel, a roughly 13-kilometer highway tunnel connecting Yilan to the Taipei metropolitan area, specifically to prevent Chinese forces from using it to advance on the capital. The drill, part of the annual Han Kuang exercises running August 5-14, brought together the Freeway Bureau's Northern Region Branch Office with military units to set up three sequential barriers under a scenario in which enemy forces attempted to force their way through, though the exercise itself was staged in an open area near the bureau's Toucheng branch rather than inside the tunnel due to heavy summer traffic. Officials described the coordination protocol plainly: civilian authorities repair infrastructure damage and hand control of the highway to the military once a threat scenario begins.
That single exercise sits inside a considerably broader shift in how this year's Han Kuang drills are structured, one that moves well past the fighter jets and warships that typically dominate coverage of Taiwan's military posture. The same week produced a bridge-blockade drill at Taipei's Guangfu Bridge, where military police built a four-tier obstacle course of Jersey barriers, Czech hedgehogs, barbed wire, and gabions to create what commanders explicitly called a "kill zone" at the bridge's Taipei-side intersection, alongside separate exercises where heavily armed troops rode Taipei's subway system carrying Stinger missiles and grenade launchers, training simultaneously to fight from underground rail infrastructure and to use it for rapid troop transfer across the city. Institute for National Defense and Security Research analyst Su Tzu-yun has been explicit about why this year's drills lean so heavily into urban terrain, arguing complex city environments favor defenders and that future exercises need to incorporate anti-armor weapons, up to and including Javelin missiles, specifically for chokepoints like tunnels and bridges where an armored column has no room to maneuver around a blockade.
The doctrine underlying all of this, using tunnels, bridges, and subway systems as deliberate defensive bottlenecks rather than simply infrastructure to protect, reflects lessons Taiwanese planners have drawn directly from Ukraine, where narrow urban terrain and destroyed river crossings repeatedly slowed Russian armored advances far more effectively than open-field engagements. It also connects to Taiwan's much older and more extensive subterranean defense tradition, the Chiashan Air Base complex carved into a granite mountain in Hualien, capable of sheltering roughly 200 fixed-wing aircraft including F-16Vs behind blast doors engineered to survive strikes short of specialized earth-penetrating munitions, and Taipei's network of more than 4,600 designated air-raid shelters, repurposed subway stations, basement car parks, and underground shopping concourses capable of sheltering over four times the capital's population. Where Chiashan represents decades-old, purpose-built hardened infrastructure, this year's tunnel and bridge blockade drills represent something newer: teaching military and civilian agencies to rapidly convert ordinary daily infrastructure into defensive terrain on short notice, a considerably more distributed and harder-to-target form of resilience than a single fortified mountain base.
What makes this defensive posture especially pointed is what's known about how China has been rehearsing the opposite side of exactly this scenario. Reporting reviewed by the American Enterprise Institute, drawing on satellite imagery and leaked footage, describes PLA training facilities built around full-scale mockups of Taiwan's government buildings, connected by a reported 280-kilometer tunnel network specifically designed to simulate scenarios in which Taiwanese leadership attempts to flee underground during a decapitation strike, alongside separate live-fire testing of anti-ship ballistic missiles and targeting systems against those same government-building replicas. Read together, both sides are training around the same underlying assumption: that a Taiwan contingency wouldn't be decided purely by naval blockade or missile exchange, but by which side controls Taipei's actual physical chokepoints, tunnels, bridges, and underground infrastructure, once ground forces are already inside the city's approaches.
None of this year's specific exercises suggests Taipei expects an imminent invasion; the Han Kuang drills are annual, and this year's heavier emphasis on urban and subterranean defense reflects a multi-year doctrinal shift toward what officials increasingly frame as "whole-of-society resilience" rather than any single new intelligence trigger. But the specificity of rehearsing a real tunnel with a real name, real Freeway Bureau officials, and a real handover protocol between civilian and military control is a meaningfully different signal than generic readiness messaging, it's Taiwan quietly mapping out, road segment by road segment, exactly where it intends to make an advancing force pay the highest possible price for every kilometer gained toward the capital.
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