If China's Tactic Is Blockading Taiwan, the U.S. Navy Needs Lots of Frigates
It’s not getting them
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
In the coming age of drone warfare and increasingly accurate and powerful missile technology, wouldn’t it be better to use submarines for convoy duty?
And we could already have the Constellation and one or more of her sisters in service if ThePowersThatBe hadn’t made so many changes to an existing design. Individually, each change could probably have been handled, but when they come in bunches like grapes, all bets are off. One of the major failings of DDG 1000 was the sheer number of “me too” experimental technologies it encompassed. KISS is a very important principle in ship design. You can usually be safe in putting one or two new toys in the next design, but don’t get greedy. Constellation’s sin was in starting with a complete, balanced, design and then trying to change a number of the components and then re-balance the design. That path will always lead to cost and schedule overruns.