China's New Nuclear-Powered Attack Submarine: Implications For Taiwan
🇨🇳 🇹🇼 | Analytical Extensions
Analytical extensions-themed posts expand on material that has appeared in another newsletter/section and other parts of this website more generally.
As explained in a recent post, military media outlet Naval News claims that the nuclear-powered submarine that China recently launched at the Bohai Shipyard near Huludao along the Bohai Sea is not yet another Type 093B-class nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) but the first completed hull of the long-anticipated next-generation Type 095-class SSN.
As explained in the above post, much rests on the maturity and competitiveness of the Type 095-class SSN, and exceedingly little information is publicly available about the Type 095-class at this time. In the absence of information, the above post identified several important areas of uncertainty and raised questions to be answered as new information is uncovered and rendered available. This post broaches the potential implications of a new Chinese SSN design of currently unknown characteristics and performance for Taiwan, just as a prior post did with respect to Japan.
Like Japan, Taiwan has much to lose if China experiences a major qualitative and/or major quantitative expansion of its undersea warfare capabilities, something that a new and potentially much-improved SSN design can offer the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s (PLAN). Many of the implications of the large-scale production of a new Chinese SSN design for Taiwan are indirect in nature. That is, a growth in Chinese naval capabilities vis-a-vis the United States and Japan will inherently affect Taiwan even though Chinese SSNs—whether an SSN of the new Type 095-class or an SSN of the existing Type 093/093B-class—are unlikely to be directly used against Taiwanese warships and merchant ships approaching Taiwanese ports, the targeting of which will likely fall to other areas of China’s expansive maritime strike capability set. That said, the advent of the Type 095-class SSN design does have a direct, albeit not a spatially direct/geographically proximate, implication for Taiwan: an expanded SSN fleet, particularly one composed of an SSN design that is superior to the most recent Type 093B-class SSN variant, will bolster China’s capacity to undertake a distant blockade—as opposed to a close blockade—of the island of Taiwan.
Some may wonder why a potential enhancement of China’s capacity to undertake a distant blockade of Taiwanese ports even matters in a context in which Taiwan’s main ports—which are not concentrated on Taiwan’s eastern coastline and are, therefore, within 300 kilometers of the Chinese mainland—are even relevant. In a 2023 China Maritime Studies Institute (CMSI) analysis, Lonnie Henley made an insightful argument that the United States and Taiwan, among others, risked a situation in which China’s opponents could potentially win the proverbial first battle but still lose the war in the absence of the capability to resupply Taiwan by sea—using its main ports—by running the proverbial gauntlet of Chinese maritime strike capabilities around the Taiwan Strait in a protracted conflict scenario.
Whatever one thinks of the premise upon which Henley’s analysis rests, and notwithstanding what appear to be very substantial advances in Chinese military capabilities since 2023, the fact remains that there is a non-zero probability scenario in which much of the Chinese surface fleet and many of China’s most capable combat aircraft are heavily damaged, if not destroyed, in the opening phase of what will likely play out as an extremely high-intensity conflict in which neither side will be able to build additional warships and combat aircraft as quickly as these are heavily damaged, if not destroyed, at least in the opening months and perhaps the opening years of major war. In such a hypothetical scenario, the PLA will likely remain capable of targeting not only the ships entering and departing Taiwan’s main ports but also Taiwan’s port infrastructure—the experiences of Iran and Ansarallah in Yemen with respect to the employment of generally low-end maritime strike capabilities in and around confined bodies of water come to mind. The PLA will, however, be more limited in its ability to put in place what amounts to a distant blockade, all in a scenario in which the waters around the island of Taiwan are likely to be high-risk operating areas for Chinese submarines of any type.
A prospective much-enlarged Chinese SSN fleet, particularly one that is centered on a new SSN design(s) that is qualitatively superior to the hitherto latest Type 093B-class design, will inherently offer the PLAN the ability to implement a distant blockade of Taiwan, among others, on the high seas, if and when additional SSNs are deployed in large numbers. The essentially unlimited range of an SSN—excluding provisions for the crew, torpedoes/missiles, and certain types of supplies—means that a Chinese SSN may, for example, operate in the Strait of Malacca, the Gulf of Aden, the waters off the southern coast of Africa, the Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific, and elsewhere in Pacific Ocean and the rest of the World Ocean, with the aim of targeting, among other things, ships that are being sent to resupply Taiwan in a protracted war scenario. Even a single SSN can do a lot of damage to merchant shipping, not least in the context of a war in which a large subset of the world’s fleet of merchant ships is likely to be stranded in Chinese ports—alongside much of the world’s shipbuilding capacity—and in the event that a Chinese SSN lingers near a maritime chokepoint and/or a major port.
Uncertainties about the performance of China’s new Type 095-class SSN design and the number of SSNs that China will build and deploy over the next five to ten years notwithstanding, the very prospect of a significantly enlarged Chinese SSN fleet, particularly one that is increasingly composed of submarines that are more capable than the Type 093B-class variant, has considerable, albeit primarily indirect, implications for Taiwan. Chinese SSNs are unlikely to be involved in targeting ships around the Taiwan Strait, let alone in the Taiwan Strait, but an expanded Chinese SSN fleet—which is presumably why Beijing oversaw the expansion of the Bohai Shipyard in the first place—will offer Beijing a distant blockade capability that it is otherwise unlikely to have in a protracted war scenario. Here, as elsewhere, Taiwan is being assailed on multiple fronts.