Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, Robert Kaplan maintains that a “Greater China” is taking shape at sea, backed by a well-armed, increasingly ambitious People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN). Kaplan, an Atlantic Monthly columnist and senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, urges Taipei and Washington to work together to make military action around Taiwan “prohibitively costly” for Beijing. Joint action would keep Taiwan from being swallowed up in a Greater China.
What does that mean in practice? For Taiwan’s Republic of China Navy (ROCN), ratcheting up the costs for China means balking Chinese efforts to shut the US Navy out of maritime Asia. In operational terms, it means denying the PLAN command of the waters off Taiwan. In effect, the Taiwanese fleet would hold open a portal from the Pacific into nearby waters, letting US Navy expeditionary forces reach the theater in wartime. It would amplify the hazards of naval war for Beijing while reducing them for Washington.
Greater prospects of success coupled with diminished risk would make it easier for a US president to order the US fleet into combat.
The ROCN must reinvent itself to execute such a strategy. The navy has traditionally considered itself a “sea-control” force able to vanquish China’s navy through fleet-on-fleet battles. As the victor, Taipei would then exercise near-total control over vital waters, buffering against a Chinese invasion force. This approach made sense while the PLAN remained an afterthought in Chinese military strategy, but that’s no longer true — as Kaplan points out.
The PLAN has designed its fleet to strike at US weaknesses, denying Washington the option of intervening in a cross-strait fracas. Think about stealthy diesel submarines. Undersea craft can lurk undetected offshore and they pack a wallop in the form of antiship missiles and wake-homing torpedoes — deadly “fish” that home in on the turbulence churned up by a target ship’s propellers. Chinese engineers are experimenting with antiship ballistic missiles able to hit ships underway.
And so on. The Chinese fleet is geared not to defeating the US Navy in a toe-to-toe fight but to “sea denial.” A sea-denial navy sees little need to control critical seas itself; it merely wants to keep a superior foe from using them.
Admiral Stansfield Turner explains that sea denial is “essentially guerrilla warfare at sea,” a mode of combat in which a lesser navy hits and runs to wear down a stronger opponent. If successful, Chinese sea denial would transform offshore waters into virtual no-go territory for an adversary like the US Pacific Fleet despite the US Navy’s overall superiority. Sea denial, then, provides a way for Beijing to accomplish its goals while conceding that its fleet remains inferior to its main antagonist.
The ROCN can take a page from Beijing’s book. If a weaker yet savvy PLAN can deny the US Navy access to Asian waters writ large, a weaker yet savvy ROCN can deny the PLAN access to the waters surrounding Taiwan. In hardware terms, this means playing down platforms designed for major fleet actions. For example, the navy’s premier warships are 30-year-old Kidd-class destroyers. These warships had their day, but they are less and less equal to the Chinese air threat.
Nor is there much chance of restoring outright Taiwanese naval supremacy in an age of annual double-digit increases in the Chinese military budget. Rather than attempt to maintain a balanced fleet able to defeat the PLAN, Taipei should move toward an unbalanced fleet designed for hit-and-run operations in Stansfield Turner’s sense. A sea-denial ROCN would emphasize large numbers of small, stealthy, relatively inexpensive surface combatants that punch above their weight.
To their credit, naval leaders acknowledge the value of fast patrol craft. However, the ROCN sea-denial fleet remains backward, while attempts to upgrade it suffer from cost overruns, poor design and slipshod construction. The Kuang Hua VI missile boats now entering service are of dubious quality. Chinese observers ridicule the Kuang Hua’s unwieldy superstructure and the non-stealthy fittings littering its decks. These features compromise the boat’s stealth while impairing its stability in rough seas — the worst of all worlds.
A 907-tonne missile corvette is reportedly under development. If built in sufficient numbers and dispersed around the island’s periphery — not concentrated in major seaports like the current ROCN fleet, which is vulnerable to pre-emptive attack — corvettes could sortie in wartime to harass PLAN vessels. A maritime guerrilla force would slow down a Chinese assault, protract the conflict and buy a precious commodity for Taipei and Washington — time.
James Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara are associate professors of strategy at the US Naval War College. The views voiced here are theirs alone and not those of the Taipei Times.
Saudi Arabian largesse is flooding Egypt’s cultural scene, but the reception is mixed. Some welcome new “cooperation” between two regional powerhouses, while others fear a hostile takeover by Riyadh. In Cairo, historically the cultural capital of the Arab world, Egyptian Minister of Culture Nevine al-Kilany recently hosted Saudi Arabian General Entertainment Authority chairman Turki al-Sheikh. The deep-pocketed al-Sheikh has emerged as a Medici-like patron for Egypt’s cultural elite, courted by Cairo’s top talent to produce a slew of forthcoming films. A new three-way agreement between al-Sheikh, Kilany and United Media Services — a multi-media conglomerate linked to state intelligence that owns much of
The US and other countries should take concrete steps to confront the threats from Beijing to avoid war, US Representative Mario Diaz-Balart said in an interview with Voice of America on March 13. The US should use “every diplomatic economic tool at our disposal to treat China as what it is... to avoid war,” Diaz-Balart said. Giving an example of what the US could do, he said that it has to be more aggressive in its military sales to Taiwan. Actions by cross-party US lawmakers in the past few years such as meeting with Taiwanese officials in Washington and Taipei, and
The Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan has no official diplomatic allies in the EU. With the exception of the Vatican, it has no official allies in Europe at all. This does not prevent the ROC — Taiwan — from having close relations with EU member states and other European countries. The exact nature of the relationship does bear revisiting, if only to clarify what is a very complicated and sensitive idea, the details of which leave considerable room for misunderstanding, misrepresentation and disagreement. Only this week, President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) received members of the European Parliament’s Delegation for Relations
Denmark’s “one China” policy more and more resembles Beijing’s “one China” principle. At least, this is how things appear. In recent interactions with the Danish state, such as applying for residency permits, a Taiwanese’s nationality would be listed as “China.” That designation occurs for a Taiwanese student coming to Denmark or a Danish citizen arriving in Denmark with, for example, their Taiwanese partner. Details of this were published on Sunday in an article in the Danish daily Berlingske written by Alexander Sjoberg and Tobias Reinwald. The pretext for this new practice is that Denmark does not recognize Taiwan as a state under