Video From Recent Taiwanese Naval Exercise Highlights Major Capability Shortcomings
🇨🇳 🇹🇼 Commentary
Commentary-themed posts are intended to broach or highlight a specific issue, not limited to recent and ongoing events. These posts will typically be much shorter and less detailed than analysis-themed posts.
An official video documenting Taiwan’s recently concluded military/naval exercise may be impressive enough if taken at face value, but it also highlights many of the limitations of the Taiwanese military, limitations that are increasingly consequential amid intensifying military-technological competition between China and the United States.
The above video starts by highlighting Taiwan’s (naval) minelaying capabilities, including one of the Min Jiang-class minelayers currently in service with the Taiwanese navy—additional hulls are on order. While (naval) minelaying is likely to constitute a consequential Taiwanese capability set in a Taiwan invasion scenario, this approach to (naval) minelaying is increasingly impractical for Taiwan. The People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) maritime strike capabilities are increasingly formidable, and the scope for using the likes of not just anti-ship cruise missiles but also propeller-driven strike drones to target dedicated and ad hoc (naval) minelayers in and around the Taiwan Strait is fast increasing. Taiwan’s purpose-built Min Jiang-class minelayers may be quite fast and inexpensive, but are also small and have negligible air defence capabilities—note the second image.
As I will explain later in this post, Taiwan’s (naval) minelayers cannot realistically count on Taiwanese warships for air defence and are, as such, an impractical means of deploying naval mines much beyond Taiwan’s immediate coastline. More generally, Taiwan’s (naval) minelayers are highly vulnerable to attack while in port, and lack the endurance to remain at sea for long once mines are loaded and minelayers sortie out to sea at the outset of a crisis or conflict. There is no simple solution to this multifaceted challenge, one that has nothing to do with the quality and effectiveness of Taiwan’s naval mines once somehow deployed in militarily significant numbers.
A lot hinges on Taiwan’s ability to successfully employ its expanding, increasingly diverse, and, in certain respects, increasingly sophisticated arsenal of anti-ship cruise missiles. As with its naval minelayers, Taiwan’s anti-ship cruise missile batteries, particularly the launchers associated with the very large and heavy Hsiung Feng III ramjet-powered supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, are prime targets for the PLA in their garrisons, the garages of which are pictured above. As I’ve explained in other contexts, there is a very real prospect that the PLA will deploy propeller-driven fixed-wing loitering strike drones, some of which may have automatic target recognition and automatic target engagement capabilities, to hunt for highly differentiated/distinguishable Taiwanese military vehicles moving on roads—the above trailer-type launcher has negligible cross-country mobility—in time of war. While there are other, more practical and promising ways to go about deploying anti-ship cruise missile launchers on the island of Taiwan, the approach exemplified in the above images does not inspire much confidence, given current technological trends and the fact that just 130-180 kilometers of water separates the island of Taiwan from China (at the narrowest points).
As noted earlier, the Taiwanese surface fleet is very poorly positioned to extend a credible air defence capability beyond Taiwan’s coastline. The above screenshots either show warships with negligible air defences or qualitatively and/or quantitatively very deficient air defences. China’s maritime strike capabilities—ground-, sea-, air-, and submarine-launched maritime strike munitions—are extremely formidable over a distance of 200-300 kilometers from the Chinese coastline. The Taiwanese navy not only faces the increasingly potent threat posed by Chinese supersonic anti-ship munitions, but also operational and prospective Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles. Given the military-geographical context of the Taiwan Strait, China does not need the likes of the DF-21D and DF-26 anti-ship ballistic missiles to target Taiwanese naval ships. Far smaller, lighter, less sophisticated, less expensive, and, as such, likely more numerous—should the PLA heavily invest in this capability area—will do when it comes to targeting warships—and merchant ships—over a distance of 200-300 kilometers. It bears emphasis that the Taiwanese navy does not currently have any (naval) ballistic missile defence capability and that Taiwan’s currently operational ground-based ballistic missile defences only extend a limited protective footprint out to sea.
The challenges that the Taiwanese military faces are multi-faceted, and there are no quick and easy—to say nothing of inexpensive—fixes available. As it concerns naval capabiltiies and, to a lesser degree, air combat capabilities, Taiwanese decision-makers must, of course, balance between (A) the imperative of maintaining a sufficiently credible force that can be used in a crisis short of war to prevent a de facto PLA naval and aerial blockade that can “swallow” Taiwan without violence and (B) the imperative of developing a sufficiently credible force that will make Taiwan difficult to invade and occupy once fighting starts. The requirements for these two distinct capability sets have little overlap and are often in tension, not least when scarce/finite resources must be allocated. As things stand, publicly available documentation of Taiwan’s most recent military/naval exercise does not inspire much confidence at a time when the military options available to Chinese decision-makers are fast-expanding as a result of both technological change and intensifying military-technological competition between the United States and China.