Recently, former Commander of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral Blair, and former Honorary Lecturer at the War College of National Defense University in Taiwan, Mr. Liao Hongxiang, co-authored a publication titled “How Taiwan Can Win the Taiwan Strait: A More Flexible Navy to Deter China.” The core perspective of the article is very straightforward: Taiwan does not need to defeat the Chinese navy or control the entire Taiwan Strait. What Taiwan truly needs is to establish a navy that is decentralized, flexible, difficult to destroy, and capable of sustaining attacks against invading fleets.
The two individuals suggest that Taiwan could employ smaller, decentralized, and survivable surface combat platforms, integrated with submarines, mobile missiles, drones, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance systems, and resilient command and control capabilities, to build a defense architecture centered on “maritime deterrence.”
The authors particularly emphasize the cost and survivability difference. The article proposes that the cost of a small escort ship could be less than 200 million U.S. dollars per vessel, while large warships could cost up to 2 billion U.S. dollars each. By trading lower costs for greater quantity and decentralized deployment, the impact of the destruction of a single ship on overall combat power could be reduced.
In fact, to some extent, the Taiwan Navy has quietly embarked on this asymmetric path. However, Blair and Liao’s article packages it as a comprehensive strategic discourse and at the same time points out the systemic resistance behind it. The most representative product of this approach is the Tuo Jiang-class missile corvette.
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