The US Navy Needs Frigates to Save Taiwan - But Doesn't Have Them

 

[By David Axe]

If China ever makes good on decades of threats and invades Taiwan, it could succeed or fail in the span of a few hours—the hours it would take to sail an invasion force across the Taiwan Strait and land troops on beaches or in ports.

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.

That’s why China might choose to slowly strangle Taiwan instead of knocking it out with a single swift blow. It’s the less risky approach—and the Taiwanese and their allies aren’t ready for it. Taiwanese and US forces are arming themselves for a short, decisive battle over the Taiwan Strait. They’re not arming themselves for a drawn-out maritime blockade that might play out across millions of square miles of lonely ocean.

Most alarmingly, the Americans have botched an effort to acquire a large flotilla of inexpensive frigates that would be ideal for convoy escort duty—the kind of duty that could break a Chinese blockade at acceptable cost.

To understand how a blockade might play out, the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington has run a series of realistic war games under different assumptions, reporting results last month. In some scenarios, Chinese forces interdict ships sailing toward Taiwan but don’t sink them—skirting the threshold of violence that might compel Taiwan’s allies, particularly the United States and Japan, to intervene.

In those scenarios, Chinese sailors seize more than 400 Taiwan-bound merchant ships—and Taiwan begins running out of food in two weeks and natural gas in 10 weeks. On the brink of collapse, ‘Taiwan 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,’ CSIS reported.

A US intervention risks drawing in Japan, too—and, 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’s scenarios, is a convoy war not dissimilar to the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II.

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—assuming, of course, Taiwan has hardened its energy grid before the blockade, stored excess oil, coal and natural gas and stocked spare parts.

But the campaign is extremely costly—especially for the US Navy, which bears the brunt of the effort in most of CSIS’s 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.

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.

In addition to battling enemy fleets on the high seas, the frigates would need to be capable of ‘independent operations,’ according to the US Navy’s 2017 industry solicitation. That’s naval speak for convoy escort duty.

The Constellation-class frigates wouldn’t 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.

If the US Navy fought a convoy war with a large flotilla of affordable Constellations, and if CSIS’s war games are predictive, the service would still lose a lot of ships. But the loss would sting much less—meaning the fleet could fight through its casualties, onward to eventual victory as more and more merchant ships arrived in Taiwanese ports.

But the Constellation program is in trouble. The design was supposed to be simple, inexpensive and easy to build at scale. Instead, it’s become complex, expensive and impossible to build at scale.

The type’s displacement has swelled by more than 700 tons as the navy has heaped boutique features onto a licensed Italian hull design. The frigate’s 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—but doesn’t expect to deploy the first in class until 2029. That’s years later than the original plan.

It’s not for no reason that, in their budget proposal for 2026, fleet planners asked for zero additional Constellations. That’s a good sign the frigate program is drifting towards cancellation. There’s nothing in the works to replace it—and 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.

‘Conducting 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,’ CSIS warned. ‘Deprioritizing was appropriate for the immediate post–Cold War era, when prospective adversaries had weak naval fleets. It is not appropriate for the current great power era.’

But the US Navy is building ships like there isn’t a possible convoy war on the horizon. This must change. America needs frigates the way Taiwan needs free and navigable seas.

David Axe is a journalist and filmmaker in South Carolina, United States.

This article appears courtesy of The Strategist and may be found in its original form here.