Mishandling of a guided missile frigate program has set Taiwan two decades behind its peers, the Control Yuan said yesterday as it handed down a corrective measure against the Navy Command and the Ministry of National Defense over the issue.
Failure to build new frigates on time and in sufficient quantity has robbed the navy of initiative amid the “gray zone” tactics of China, Control Yuan members Lai Ting-ming (賴鼎銘), Lin Wen-cheng (林文程) and Hsiao Tzu-yu (蕭自佑) wrote in a news release.
In 2008, the ministry and top navy brass began plans to obtain a flotilla of next-generation frigates with an emphasis on modern battle management capabilities equivalent to the Aegis combat system, the members said.
Photo: Taipei Times
Defense officials and navy commanders launched two programs to develop the indigenous frigates — the 2012 Xunlian Project for the Aegis-like combat system and other equipment for the ships, and the 2014 Zhenhai Project for the frigates themselves, the members said.
The projects ran into a multitude of setbacks, most of which stemmed from indecision, as the groups involved were unable to agree on a common set of requirements and constantly backpedaled on decisions, they said.
Disagreements erupted a month after the ministry submitted a plan for the projects and the navy demurred from signing a contract for the Zhenhai Project with the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology, citing the program’s “immaturity,” the members said.
In April 2020, the navy declared that the acquisition of shipborne active electronically scanned array radars (AESA) to replace passive arrays was a high priority and linked the AESA to the Zhenhai Project without changing the project’s timetable, they said.
That meant the navy had reversed its decision to use the Chungshan Institute to build the ships, they said.
Six months later, navy brass moved to terminate the Xunlian Project, citing a failure to meet capability requirements despite its certification to the contrary, they said.
In 2021, the navy scrapped the original concept for frigates with Aegis-equivalent systems altogether, instead proposing to build just two light frigates to counter incursions by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy, they said.
The service had seriously erred in its indecisiveness over the frigate program’s requirements and acting in contradiction to the requirements set by the Zhenhai Project, which accepted the utilization of passive electronically scanned arrays (PESA), they said.
Although Taiwan’s navy in 2017 submitted an AESA solicitation to the Chungshan Institute, the documentation showed that the capability requirements it described were virtually identical to the PESA system proposed in the Zhenhai Project, the members said.
There was no ground for the navy to claim that the institute failed to deliver a system with the required specifications because of the potentially misleading solicitation, they said.
As the party responsible for establishing the performance metrics of the combat system, the navy committed obvious errors in not providing consistent specifications for the capabilities it wanted, they said.
The ramifications of the mistakes include the navy’s loss of initiative in waters around Taiwan, a 20-year technology lag by the standards of regional naval forces and a continued reliance on Chi Yang-class frigates, which have been in service for more than 50 years, they added.
Additional reporting by CNA
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