The US Navy Needs Frigates to Save Taiwan – But Doesn’t Have Them
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[By David Axe]<\/em><\/p>\n If China ever makes good on decades of threats and invades Taiwan, it could succeed or fail in the span of a few hours\u2014the hours it would take to sail an invasion force across the Taiwan Strait and land troops on beaches or in ports.<\/p>\n A lot could go wrong for the Chinese. Bad weather could slow the crossing. Taiwanese missiles, mines and drones and US submarines could sink enough of the invasion fleet to disrupt the landing sequence, potentially buying time for American bombers, winging across the vast Pacific Ocean, to launch devastating barrages of anti-ship missiles. A depleted and confused landing force could be vulnerable to Taiwanese counterattack.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why China might choose to slowly strangle Taiwan instead of knocking it out with a single swift blow. It\u2019s the less risky approach\u2014and the Taiwanese and their allies aren\u2019t ready for it. Taiwanese and US forces are arming themselves for a short, decisive battle over the Taiwan Strait. They\u2019re not arming themselves for a drawn-out maritime blockade that might play out across millions of square miles of lonely ocean.<\/p>\n Most alarmingly, the Americans have botched an effort to acquire a large flotilla of inexpensive frigates that would be ideal for convoy escort duty\u2014the kind of duty that could break a Chinese blockade at acceptable cost.<\/p>\n To understand how a blockade might play out, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington has run\u00a0a series of realistic war games\u00a0under different assumptions, reporting results last month. In some scenarios, Chinese forces interdict ships sailing toward Taiwan but don\u2019t sink them\u2014skirting the threshold of violence that might compel Taiwan\u2019s allies, particularly the United States and Japan, to intervene.<\/p>\n In those scenarios, Chinese sailors seize more than 400 Taiwan-bound merchant ships\u2014and Taiwan begins running out of food in two weeks and natural gas in 10 weeks. On the brink of collapse, \u2018Taiwan would have to either make concessions to China sufficient to get China to cease its boarding campaign, escalate by using military force against Chinese forces in the exclusion zone or get the United States to intervene on its behalf,\u2019 CSIS reported.<\/p>\n A US intervention risks drawing in Japan, too\u2014and, as Chinese, Taiwanese, American and Japanese warships and warplanes tangle over the Pacific shipping lanes, violence is sure to break out. What follows, in several of CSIS\u2019s scenarios, is a convoy war not dissimilar to the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II.<\/p>\n US warships and patrol aircraft shepherd merchant ships across the Pacific to Japan, where Japanese ships and planes join the effort, fighting through Chinese missile and torpedo attacks to offload the merchantmen in Taiwanese ports. After the initial shock, Taiwanese food and energy imports quickly return to pre-war levels\u2014assuming, of course, Taiwan has hardened its energy grid before the blockade, stored excess oil, coal and natural gas and stocked spare parts.<\/p>\n But the campaign is extremely costly\u2014especially for the US Navy, which bears the brunt of the effort in most of CSIS\u2019s simulations. According to the think tank, a convoy war falling just short of a full-scale regional war could cost the Americans 34 warships, including two aircraft carriers, as well as hundreds of aircraft. Nearly 19,000 Americans die.<\/p>\n The sinkings amount to more than 10 percent of the overall US fleet, losses that would take decades to make good at current shipbuilding rates. Anticipating exactly this scenario, in 2014 the US Navy launched a new program meant to build a lot of missile-armed frigates, cheaply and fast.<\/p>\n In addition to battling enemy fleets on the high seas, the frigates would need to be capable of \u2018independent operations,\u2019\u00a0according to\u00a0the US Navy\u2019s 2017 industry solicitation. That\u2019s naval speak for convoy escort duty.<\/p>\n The Constellation-class frigates wouldn\u2019t exactly be expendable. But with a target price of $1 billion each and a displacement of just 7,000 tonnes, they would be much cheaper and easier to build than Arleigh Burke-class destroyers of nearly $3 billion and 10,000 tonnes. As recently as last year, the Constellation class was planned to peak at 58 ships, making it the second-most-numerous ship type in US service, after the Burkes.<\/p>\n If the US Navy fought a convoy war with a large flotilla of affordable Constellations, and if CSIS\u2019s war games are predictive, the service would still lose a lot of ships. But the loss would sting much less\u2014meaning the fleet could fight through its casualties, onward to eventual victory as more and more merchant ships arrived in Taiwanese ports.<\/p>\n But the Constellation program is\u00a0in trouble. The design was supposed to be simple, inexpensive and easy to build at scale. Instead, it\u2019s become complex, expensive and impossible to build at scale.<\/p>\n The type\u2019s displacement has swelled by more than 700 tons as the navy has heaped boutique features onto a licensed Italian hull design. The frigate\u2019s cost has risen by $300 million per ship, owing in part to a desperate labor shortage at American shipyards. After 11 years of work, the US Navy has paid for six of the ships\u2014but doesn\u2019t expect to deploy the first in class until 2029. That\u2019s years later than the original plan.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not for no reason that, in their budget proposal for 2026, fleet planners asked for zero additional Constellations. That\u2019s a good sign the frigate program is drifting towards cancellation. There\u2019s nothing in the works to replace it\u2014and the US Navy is almost certain to sail into a possible convoy war without the cheap, easy-to-replace ships that were supposed to make the convoy war affordable for America.<\/p>\n \u2018Conducting convoys is a basic naval task, but the US Navy is out of practice because convoys have not been a priority mission since the end of the Cold War,\u2019 CSIS warned. \u2018Deprioritizing was appropriate for the immediate post\u2013Cold War era, when prospective adversaries had weak naval fleets. It is not appropriate for the current great power era.\u2019<\/p>\n But the US Navy is building ships like there isn\u2019t a possible convoy war on the horizon. This must change. America needs frigates the way Taiwan needs free and navigable seas.<\/p>\n David Axe\u00a0is a journalist and filmmaker in South Carolina, United States.<\/em><\/p>\n This article appears courtesy of The Strategist and may be found in its original form here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \t
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