The completed hull of what appears to be a China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) new-generation frigate has recently been spotted in a dry dock at the Hudong (滬東) shipyard in Shanghai. If so, the Chinese navy would soon commence the next stage of its naval expansion.
The PLAN’s rapid expansion is reflected in the outcome of a war game by US think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies simulating an attack by China against Taiwan in 2026, which found that Taiwan would not have enough anti-ship missiles.
Sam Tangredi of the US Naval War College has written about his concern that the US does not have enough warships.
Meanwhile, a satellite photograph posted on Twitter by former US submarine warfare officer Tom Shugart, now a senior fellow in the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, shows what looks like a new class of frigate under construction in the Hudong shipyard.
At about 147m long and 18m wide, the ship looks like a configuration of the Type-054B frigate. It is bigger than the Type-054A — which is 134m long and 16m wide — while being a bit smaller than the standard Type-052D destroyer — which at 157m long and 18m wide, and an estimated displacement of 6,000 tonnes, is also known as the Luyang III-class destroyer.
The navy’s hard-kill anti-ship missile interception systems mostly employ rapid-firing cannon close-in weapon systems or short-range missiles.
However, if faced with super-saturation attacks involving a combination of low-altitude, low-speed small drones and subsonic and supersonic anti-ship missiles, they would have problems such as difficult detection and chaotic queuing, resulting in insufficient interception.
The only systems tested to effectively intercept such attacks are directed-energy weapons, such as shipborne laser and high-power microwave weapons, which are likely to become standard equipment on new-generation ships.
However, the high energy consumption of directed-energy weapons and phased-array radars makes them dependent on stable sources of electric power. This is why the UK’s Type 45 — or Daring-class — destroyers, the US’ Zumwalt-class destroyers and the UK’s two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers all employ integrated full-electric propulsion.
If the Type-054B frigate uses integrated full-electric propulsion, as it reportedly does, it would likely be equipped with shipborne laser and high-power microwave weapons.
The PLAN’s development of its Type-052C/D and Type-055 missile destroyers shows a pattern of applying any technological breakthrough on all types of ship, so when production of the Type-054A frigate and Type-052DL destroyer finishes, the Type-054B frigate can be expected to follow the same pattern by having updated equipment installed on a larger-displacement platform. It would be put into mass production to replace the Type-054A frigate, and provide an outer shield for aircraft carriers and amphibious assault ships.
Although the US military has started testing directed-energy weapons, they have not yet been used to equip troops, planes and ships. The Taiwanese navy’s existing battleships have a very limited electric power supply margin, so they could probably not be re-equipped with such power-hungry equipment.
The light frigates that would begin construction in the first half of this year have had to be divided into “air defense” and “anti-ship” types because of their limited tonnage, so there is no room for them to have additional kinds of equipment installed.
Even if the US at some point is willing to supply Taiwan with directed-energy weapons to meet urgent combat readiness needs, there would probably be no suitable platforms on which to install them.
As well as adding laser and high-power microwave weapons to the PLAN’s range of armaments, China has even exported them to Saudi Arabia, where they have been validated.
If used in a war against the attack drones that Taiwan is developing, and the Harpoon and Hsiung Feng II/III anti-ship missiles that Taiwan deploys, it is hard to tell whether these high-power microwave weapons would inhibit Taiwan’s armed forces’ asymmetric warfare capabilities. Nonetheless, the nation must urgently find a way to respond to them.
Lu Li-shih is a doctoral student in Soochow University’s Department of Political Science, and a former captain of the ROCS Hsin Chiang.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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