Separated from China by a roughly 100-mile-wide strait, Taiwan relies on its navy as the first line of defense against a potential invasion. It must be able to prevent an assault by a Chinese force carried across the Taiwan Strait in large amphibious ships. Taiwan has traditionally favored large ships such as destroyers and frigates to form the core of its fleet, both as visible symbols of state power and as tools for signaling resolve in the face of Chinese coercion, and Taiwan’s current shipbuilding plans include replacing an aging surface fleet with large and expensive new ships.

Yet large surface ships are vulnerable in the narrow waters of the Taiwan Strait—a problem compounded by advances in technology that are making them easier to detect, track, and attack. China has invested in cutting-edge intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (collectively known as ISR), as well as electronic warfare systems, drones, and missiles. Taiwan’s large surface ships are now a liability. But Taiwan has an advantage: these same technologies make China’s large amphibious ships more vulnerable in restricted waters, and those ships cannot be replaced by smaller, stealthier alternatives. Taipei can take advantage of this mismatch by replacing its destroyers and frigates with a greater number of smaller surface combatants that are more likely to survive an initial wave of Chinese strikes and remain capable of attacking a Chinese invasion fleet.

The Taiwanese navy is planning to invest heavily in large surface combatants, including a new 7,000-ton warship and as many as twelve 3,000-ton light frigates. These large ships are impediments to the radical transformation of the Taiwanese navy that the Chinese threat requires. Building ships of this size with stealth features and defense systems to survive a battle in the Taiwan Strait would be prohibitively costly; without these features, they would be too vulnerable to play a major role in the navy’s primary wartime mission of denying a Chinese invasion force the use of the Taiwan Strait. Efforts elsewhere to build similarly capable ships have proved costly and difficult. The U.S. Navy’s Constellation-class frigate program, for example, budgeted roughly $1 billion per ship; the cost eventually rose to about $1.5 billion each before the Constellation program was canceled, and even at that price the ships lacked the capabilities needed to fight an advanced adversary in restricted waters. In comparison, the spending on Taiwan’s entire shipbuilding program is projected to be $1.5 billion annually.

Rather than spend resources on large ships, Taipei should build stealthy corvettes weighing between 700 and 1,000 tons, armed with missiles and drones, that are harder to detect and target but can retain enough firepower to attack Chinese ships crossing the strait. Combined with current plans to build shore-based mobile launchers, aircraft armed with antiship missiles, and eight submarines, Taiwan can create a dispersed and hard-to-destroy defense system that can withstand Chinese attacks and repel a potential amphibious assault.

SITTING DUCKS

Large ships may be potent signals of national power, but they are relatively easy to target and politically costly to lose. When ships are fighting in narrow waterways under heavy surveillance, visibility quickly becomes a deadly liability. The sinking of a large ship can also have consequences beyond an immediate military setback. A highly visible and costly loss may make political and military leaders more cautious about risking additional warships as conflict continues.

Major naval engagements over more than the last four decades suggest that any navy expecting to fight near an enemy’s coast should be wary of building its force structure around expensive, irreplaceable hulls. The 1982 Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom, for example, showed how a single successful strike on a warship can constrain an entire surface fleet. Argentina entered the Falklands conflict with powerful ships, including the cruiser General Belgrano and the aircraft carrier Veinticinco de Mayo. But after a British submarine sank the Belgrano, Argentina decided to keep much of the rest of its surface fleet, including the carrier, closer to coastal waters or in ports for the rest of the war.

In the Persian Gulf six years later, the U.S. Navy’s ability to combine surveillance, aircraft, ships, and precision weapons devastated Iranian naval forces during Operation Praying Mantis. In a single day, U.S. forces sank or badly damaged several Iranian surface vessels operating in the confined waters of the Gulf, including two large frigates. Whereas the Falklands War illustrated the political consequences of losing a major warship, Praying Mantis highlighted the danger for ships facing an adversary with a much more effective “kill chain”—the sensors and communications to detect, identify, track, target, and attack an opponent’s fleet. For Taiwan, the lesson is that the combat power of large warships is irrelevant if they cannot survive long enough to fight, and an early loss could have cascading effects on the navy’s sustained combat operations.

A restructuring of Taiwan’s surface fleet is within reach.

Losing a smaller ship is less costly politically and militarily than losing a larger warship. In 2006, for instance, a Hezbollah cruise missile struck the Israeli corvette Hanit, which was operating in the waters off Lebanon. The ship had not been warned of the threat and had little time to detect and respond to a missile launched from shore 12 miles away, and some of its defensive systems were not fully activated. The missile killed four sailors and damaged the ship’s equipment, but the crew contained the damage and the Hanit limped home. The attack did not lead Israel to abandon corvettes; instead, it built larger, better-armed corvettes.

Most important for Taiwan, Ukraine’s Black Sea campaign after Russia’s invasion in 2022 showed that a weaker power can constrain a stronger one in contested waters without commanding the sea or possessing a comparable fleet. The campaign combined land-based antiship cruise missiles, swarms of uncrewed surface vessels, aerial drones, and external intelligence to impose heavy costs on Russian naval operations in the Black Sea. These attacks helped push much of Russia’s fleet farther from Ukraine’s shores. The sinking of the flagship Moskva, for example, showed that even a ship equipped with layered air defenses was vulnerable to an adversary’s kill chain. The ongoing war in Iran reinforces this pattern: the United States and Israel severely damaged Iran’s surface navy early in the conflict, but they have had difficulty eliminating dispersed missiles, drones, patrol craft and mine-laying boats. The result is that Iran, despite losing much of its conventional naval power, has retained the ability to threaten shipping and disrupt access to the Strait of Hormuz.

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL

As these examples show, a less powerful navy does not need to control its coastal waters to deny a stronger adversary the ability to use them. In the Taiwan Strait, therefore, the goal should be “sea denial”: preventing China from using the waterway freely enough to carry out an invasion. Achieving sea denial does not require Taiwan to abandon its surface navy. But it must build a different kind of fleet—one based on a greater number of smaller ships that can operate independently while sharing information and coordinating their attacks, making the fleet more likely to survive an initial assault and repel an invasion force.

Finland and Sweden are good models. Both countries must deter and defend against a larger, more powerful adversary—Russia—and they are simultaneously contesting sovereignty challenges to areas they control and preparing for potential amphibious attacks on their coasts. With navies built around corvette-class-sized ships, Finland and Sweden have successfully stood up to Russian pressure, harassing Russian submarines that have violated their territorial seas. They have escorted away Russian ships that entered their waters and lodged diplomatic protests with Moscow. Both countries have extensive, sophisticated, and steadily improving surveillance, communications, and decision-support networks.

A restructuring of Taiwan’s surface fleet is within reach. In July, Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te attended the commissioning ceremony of the navy’s eighth and newest missile patrol ship—a lightweight but heavily armed corvette built in Taiwan with an innovative catamaran hull that makes the ship faster and more stable—and four more of these vessels are scheduled to be commissioned by the end of the year. Taiwan’s shipbuilding industry can rapidly produce these vessels, and the more it builds, the more efficient it will become. Sustained production would bring costs down, and each successive batch of vessels can incorporate new weapons, sensors, and uncrewed systems as they develop. Each of these ships has been delivered to the navy for less than $200 million, whereas a single 7,000-ton warship will cost an estimated $2 billion.

These changes should be combined with a broader upgrading of Taiwan’s armed forces’ network of sensors, communications tools, drones, and missiles. Taiwan is already making some of these investments. Its most recent special budget and the next round of its naval plans strengthen the kill chain with maritime surveillance drones, upgraded command-and-control networks to direct and coordinate military forces, and artificial intelligence-assisted combat decision support systems. These are the essential building blocks of an effective system to deny China the ability to freely navigate the Taiwan Strait. But the same technologies that make Taiwan’s kill chain more effective also make its large surface ships susceptible to attacks. Only by restructuring and upgrading its surface fleet can Taiwan be ready for a potential invasion.

A restructured Taiwanese surface fleet would also support plans to build eight new submarines, the first of which is already in sea trials. Submarines are slower but stealthier than corvettes. Missiles and drones launched from corvettes can disable ships by hitting them above the surface, and torpedoes launched from submarines can sink them. Changing its approach to its surface fleet is a key part of how Taiwan can make its other naval investments more effective.

RIGHTING THE SHIP

The obstacles to the transformation of Taiwan’s navy are more institutional than technical. Because they are highly visible, large ships are attractive to politicians. They bring contracts for shipyards, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, a sense of national achievement, and visible proof of the government’s commitment to national security. By contrast, the public cannot see a warehouse full of drones or a mobile missile launcher hidden in the mountains. For navy leadership, too, the status quo is easier than pushing for major change. Taiwan’s destroyers and frigates, many of which are based on 50-year-old American designs, are well understood and therefore institutionally safe choices.

But rather than continue to upgrade these obsolescent, if not obsolete, ships, Taiwan should progressively decommission them and redirect scarce resources toward the lighter surface ships it needs. Moving away from familiar platforms will require political and military leaders to take risks and overcome the setbacks and criticism that accompany any institutional change. Production of Taiwan’s first domestically built submarines, for instance, is currently behind schedule. But such challenges are inevitable when dealing with complex vessels and should not derail necessary investments. Government and defense leaders need to sustain support for these programs and justify their importance to the public, even when opposition politicians criticize them.

After years of stagnation and decline, Taiwan’s defense spending is finally increasing. Taiwan’s proposed 2027 defense budget is likely to surpass three percent of GDP, and the legislature also passed a $25 billion special defense budget in May (a significant sum, albeit down from the $40 billion originally proposed by the executive branch). But Taiwan will not be more secure if these resources are spent on outdated defense concepts and a small number of vulnerable large warships. The country needs a dispersed, agile, and lethal force structure to defeat China in the Taiwan Strait. Such a navy will not look as impressive during a fleet review, but it will be a more effective deterrent against a potential Chinese invasion.

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