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.

Large ships may be potent signals of national power, but they are relatively easy to target and politically costly to lose. When ships........

© Foreign Affairs