Ukraine's Lesson For Taiwan: Build Big, Cheap And Numerous Cruise Missiles

Taipei needs its own Flamingo

Flamingo. Fire Point photo

The best thing about Ukraine’s new Flamingo, a 6-tonne fiberglass monstrosity with a secondhand turbofan engine, basic guidance and a pair of old gravity bombs for a warhead, is that it’s cheap. One of the cruise missiles may cost just $500,000.

Taiwan should pay attention.

The first Flamingo raid, on 30 August, was modest. Three of the ramp-launched missiles damaged parked Russian hovercraft in Crimea, 100 km from the front line. But Fire Point plans to churn out hundreds of Flamingos a month, potentially reshaping Ukraine’s campaign of deep strikes targeting Russian air bases, rail nodes, factories, oil refineries and other strategic targets.

Could Taiwan copy Ukraine’s approach and manufacture thousands of inexpensive cruise missiles to help defeat a Chinese invasion force? It depends on whether Taiwanese developers can take the Ukrainian approach and design a missile that trades some accuracy and survivability to keep down costs and maximize the size of the war stock.

It’s far from clear that Taiwan is poised to husband its own flock of Flamingos. But it’s not hard to see how, with a little effort and a lot of political will, the island democracy could build up its own massive deep-strike arsenal, one that could seriously complicate Chinese movement in the event of a war across the Taiwan Strait.

But given the escalating tensions across the strait, Taipei should move quickly to hatch its own Flamingos. It should develop its own big and cheap strike missile.

Read the rest at The Strategist.