Observed operations
Defence reform and civil resilience programme
Longer conscription, a bigger budget and a slow argument about whether to buy a conventional military or an inconvenient one.
Conflict coverage · Taiwan Strait
Context, not targeting. Campaign records describe objectives, participants, phases and outcomes at the level of published analysis; they contain no current positions, force ratios, unit locations or strengths.
Operations & Contingencies5 sustained efforts in Taiwan Strait, each grouping the events that belong to it. Status describes where a campaign stands, never who is winning.
Observed operations
Sustained pressure below the threshold
A campaign whose object is not territory but the definition of normal — and which is measured in daily reports rather than in ground taken.
Observed operations
The Cold War strait crises
Three confrontations across four decades that established what the strait's participants would and would not actually do — and that have never been repeated.
Declared plans
The declared unification framework
What Beijing has actually written down about unification — and what the text does and does not commit anyone to.
Assessed contingencies
Coercive maritime interdiction — quarantine to blockade
The one contingency with enough evidence behind it to describe: interference with what arrives by sea, on a spectrum from inspection to closure.
Evidence and grading
- Observed operation
- Documented as having occurred or as occurring, with sources. Its lifecycle status says where it stands.
- Declared plan — not an observed operation
- A concept a party has publicly declared or published. Vigil records that the declaration exists and who made it. It is NOT a statement that anything is being executed, prepared or intended on any timescale.
- Assessed contingency — not an observed operation
- Vigil’s description of what a contingency would involve, published because the question is asked. Nothing here is occurring, nobody has declared it in this form, and it is not a forecast. The record states what it rests on and what would change it.
- Confidence
- How well established Vigil considers this assessment to be. It is not a measure of how severe the situation is.