The Civil-Defense Gap: From Kuma Academy to Whole-of-Society Resilience, How Wide Is Taiwan's Preparedness Shortfall?

When an air-raid siren actually sounds, the first question people face is very concrete: where should they go? Is the basement, the MRT station, or the underground parking level open? Can the route, capacity, and supplies be looked up if mobile networks go down?

But the problem those few minutes expose cannot be solved in a few minutes.

Taiwan has a siren and shelter-lookup system, but "what to do after receiving the alert" still needs clearer, offline-usable public guidance. People need to know in advance the location of their nearest shelter, its opening procedures, and alternative routes — not have to search for them only after the siren has already sounded.

That "not knowing" is a microcosm of Taiwan's civil-defense gap.

In 2021, Puma Shen, founder of Doublethink Lab, together with several civil-society partners, launched a civilian civil-defense training program known outside Taiwan as "Project Kuma" (Kuma Academy). Its curriculum covers basics of urban search and rescue, hemorrhage control and bandaging, emergency evacuation, recognizing cognitive warfare, and community coordination and command.

Kuma Academy's own website states that it has trained more than 80,000 people in total ^[1]. The original draft also listed media-reach figures and a gender breakdown, but because these currently lack an auditable methodology and population definition, they cannot be presented as equivalent evidence alongside the actual trainee count, and the related figures have been removed.

Kuma Academy is one of the more visible civilian civil-defense organizations in Taiwan. Its value lies in offering entry-level training for citizens, but its effectiveness should still be assessed against indicators such as course completion, skill retention, and community coverage.

Dividing 80,000 directly by Taiwan's population of roughly 23 million yields about 0.35%. But that is only a ratio calculation, not national civil-defense coverage: it does not count government, fire-service, emergency-medical, corporate, or other civilian training, and the depth of the courses also differs.

This is really a structural problem in Taiwan's civil defense. What civil society can do is light a spark — it cannot be the whole fire. Getting all 23,000,000 people prepared requires a government-led, systematic mechanism: a legal framework, budget investment, local-government execution capacity, and public education sustained over many years. At present, none of these is complete.

Both of Taiwan's two main laws governing the current civil-defense and mobilization system were promulgated in 2001. The original draft claimed the two laws' "combined age exceeds a century," which is a clear arithmetic error.

The Civil Defense Act (enacted and promulgated in 2001)

The Civil Defense Act was enacted and promulgated in 2001, mainly governing the organization, training, drills, and support of civil-defense teams. More than two decades later, the risks it now faces have expanded to include gray-zone activity, cognitive warfare, attacks on critical infrastructure, and urban resilience; the current framework still needs to add cross-agency coordination, corporate business-continuity obligations, and community-level execution responsibility ^[3].

The All-out Defense Mobilization Preparation Act (2001)

The All-out Defense Mobilization Preparation Act established a mobilization-readiness framework; whether it is adequate for local, self-directed operation under a communications blackout is a matter for legal and drill-effectiveness assessment, and a conclusion cannot be drawn simply by citing the Civil Defense Act. A more verifiable approach is to examine the scenarios, participating agencies, and improvement records of the 2025 and 2026 Town Resilience Drills ^[11][12].

In 2024, the Office of the President established the Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee, an attempt to integrate government, civilian, and societal forces within the existing legal framework ^[2]. But establishing the committee does not equal solving the problem — for its work to produce visible results, it still needs follow-up regulations, budgets, and implementation measures.

Conscription Reform: One Year, but Only a Beginning

Starting in 2024, mandatory military service for Taiwanese men was extended to one year (from the previous four-month military training service), alongside a strengthened reservist training system ^[4]. This is the most important force-structure policy adjustment in a decade, but it mainly concerns regular and reserve military forces, and has not yet extended to broader civilian community-resilience building.

Gap One: The Generational Problem of Air-Raid Shelters

The National Police Agency provides a lookup service for air-raid shelters, but the public map by itself cannot prove each facility's usable condition, capacity, supplies, and opening procedures in a crisis ^[5]. What can be confirmed, then, is that the lookup system exists; whether facilities everywhere are actually usable still requires point-by-point checks and drills by local governments, and a single case cannot be extrapolated to the whole country.

Gap Two: Household and Business Supply Preparedness Lacks Consistent Verification

How much drinking water, food, medicine, and backup power households and businesses actually keep on hand is currently missing a comparable public inventory. Sweden, by contrast, mails crisis-preparedness guidance directly to households, offering Taiwan a verifiable institutional reference ^[7]. What Taiwan needs is a clear checklist, regular updates, and drills — not a sense of security manufactured from undisclosed assumptions about national stockpiles.

Gap Three: The Absence of Degraded-Communications Drills

If mobile networks and the internet were to go down at the same time, citizens, businesses, and local governments would need alternative channels such as radio broadcast, walkie-talkies, satellite links, or community phone trees. Public information is not sufficient to prove that every county and city has already completed this kind of degraded-communications drill, so the most practical approach is to require localities to publish their drill scenarios, participating agencies, and improvement results. (reasonable inference)

Building whole-of-society resilience is not a problem unique to Taiwan, but Taiwan can learn from countries that are further ahead.

Sweden: Sweden maintained a full civil-defense system from 1939 to 2009, which it then wound down following the collapse of the Soviet Union. After the 2014 Crimea conflict, Sweden began reassessing. In 2018, the Swedish government mailed the booklet If Crisis or War Comes (Om krisen eller kriget kommer) to every household, spelling out concretely what to do if water, power, or communications go down, along with the list and quantities of supplies households should stock ^[7]. In 2024, Sweden formally joined NATO, and its civil-defense system continues to be strengthened.

Finland: Finland's Ministry of the Interior publicly explains its civil-defense shelters and local preparedness system, illustrating that civil defense must rely on routine maintenance and local responsibility, not ad hoc mobilization at the moment of crisis ^[8].

Taiwan's Gap: Taiwan went through roughly 30 years of a cross-strait détente period, during which civil-defense awareness was almost deliberately played down, treated as an act that "creates tension." Trying to catch up in a short time now means confronting not only legal and resource problems, but also a reorientation of social culture. Part of Kuma Academy's value lies precisely in the fact that it opened this door in a depoliticized way.

The State's Perspective: Put Civil Defense on the Same Priority Level as the Defense Budget

Taiwan's military strength is growing (extended conscription, procurement of asymmetric weapons), but the gap in civilian resilience is creating a structural contradiction: the deterrent power of regular forces is increasing, but if ordinary citizens fall into chaos on day one of a crisis — not knowing where to go, without supplies, unable to communicate — the foundation of that deterrence is also shaken. Civil defense and military power are two ends of the same equation, not budget rivals across different agencies. The government should clarify the legal status of an "All-out Defense Resilience Framework" and turn the renewal of urban shelters, household supply-stockpiling guidance, and degraded-communications drills into policy commitments with timetables, budgets, and accountability. (observation; high confidence)

The Industry Perspective: Businesses Are Core Nodes of Community Resilience

Large enterprises could become nodes of community resilience, but whether their underground spaces, generators, and storage can be opened to the public involves building safety, fire protection, security, fuel, and division of liability, and it cannot simply be assumed that all of them can serve as shelters or supply depots. If the government wants to build a framework for corporate cooperation, it should first define the legal basis, activation conditions, and safety standards; businesses, meanwhile, can start by bringing backup power, offline data, and employee contact systems into their business-continuity management. (recommendation; medium confidence)

The SME Perspective: Minimum Action, Maximum Protection — Starting With Your Own Office and Home

For SME owners, the most practical starting point for civil-defense preparation is their own company and home. Concrete actions include preparing drinking water, food, and medicine according to official guidance, drawing up a business-continuity plan with offline backups retained, confirming first-aid kits and backup communication tools, and arranging for employees to receive first-aid or civil-defense training. (recommendation; reasonable inference)