The contract design phase of the nation’s first indigenous submarine project has been completed and the prototype would be ready by 2024, Minister of National Defense Yen De-fa (嚴德發) said yesterday.
After a closed-door legislative briefing, Yen told reporters that the military has acquired all the export permits needed from foreign contractors to complete the contract design for the first domestically built submarine.
The completion of the contract design was the first phase of the submarine project, which is to be followed by the blueprint design, then construction of a prototype and mass production, he said.
Photo: Screengrab from Wang Ting-yu’s Facebook
In the next phase, the military would need more export permits, Yen said.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu (王定宇), who chaired the briefing, confirmed that legislators were shown more than 700 export permits the military had obtained for the design stage.
Several foreign contractors that had agreed to work with Taiwan in the design phase had reneged because of pressure from China, he said.
Nonetheless, the project is going according to plan and is on track to have a blueprint completed by next year and a prototype by 2024, Yen and Wang said.
Military sources had earlier told the Central News Agency that the technologies Taiwan needed to design and build its own submarines were color coded red, yellow and green, with red denoting technology such as the main diesel engine, torpedoes and missile systems, which Taiwan could not build on its own.
The yellow parts were difficult to obtain, but could be made in Taiwan, while the green components were more likely to be made domestically, the sources said.
The government has allocated NT$49 billion (US$1.59 billion) over seven years to build an indigenous submarine, with the goal of boosting the nation’s defense capabilities amid China’s growing military prowess.
The navy currently has four submarines, two of which were purchased from the US in the 1970s, while the other two were bought from the Netherlands in the 1980s.
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