Powerful New Corvettes Showcase Taiwan’s High Bang for the Buck Defense Spending

Taiwan soldiers stand next to the domestically produced corvette class vessel Tuo Chiang (R) during a drill at the northern city of Keelung, Taiwan, on Jan. 7, 2022. (Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

Taiwan recently accepted the delivery of a pair of very fast, stealthy corvettes bristling with weapons that exemplify just how much bang for the buck the defense industry of a small country facing an existential threat can deliver.

The two Tuo Chiang-Class corvettes (or Tuo Jiang)—the fifth and sixth delivered to the Taiwanese navy—cost $63.5 million per ship.

The Tuo Chiangs are very fast, have good range, can attack land, air, and sea targets, and, despite their small size, have an impressive multi-tiered air defense system. While the Tuo-Chiang Class corvette’s displacement is only about one-sixth of the 3,500-ton United States Freedom Class littoral combat ship, on a per ton displacement basis, they pack at least two to three times the firepower of our littoral combat ships.

More specifically, the Taiwanese navy gets a 685-ton corvette with a wave-piercing catamaran hull that has a top speed of 46 mph and a range of 2,300 miles. And its stealth radar cross-section is that of a small fishing boat. Along with its exceptional small ship combination of speed and range, the Tuo Chiang’s hulls are crammed full of weapon goodness, including two different types of anti-air missiles, a towed variable depth sonar, a 76 mm gun capable of firing guided rounds into land, sea, and air targets, a Phalanx CIWS, torpedoes, anti-ship missiles, sophisticated AESA radars, and two general purpose guns that would be effective in shooting down the kind of cheap drones being used by the Houthis to plague the U.S. Navy and Red Sea shipping.

Perhaps even more impressive than the incredible per ton of displacement firepower the Tuo Chiang corvettes bring to the table is that many of its key weapon systems were developed and built by the Taiwan defense industry, including its:

• TC-2N air defense missile with a range of 19 miles.
• Sea Oryx short-range air defense missile that many describe as similar to our RIM-116 Rolling Airframe short-range air defense missile with a range of 5 to 6 miles.
• Hsiung Feng II, a subsonic anti-ship cruise missile with a range of 5 to 6 miles.
• Hsiung Feng III, a Mach 6 anti-ship missile with a 70- to 90-mile range.
• TCS/MPQ-90 Bee Eye, an active electronically scanned array (AESA) type radar.

This impressive home-brewed technology and other technology are employed on Taiwan’s other 70 warships. Perhaps most remarkably, Taiwan designed its own diesel-electric attack submarine class, the Hai Kun class, of which the first of eight is expected to be commissioned in 2025.

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Together, Taiwan’s navy, not including marines, boasts about 38,000 personnel, 117 ships/attack craft, and 28 aircraft, including highly capable P-3C Orion anti-submarine warfare patrol planes. It is rated as the 12th most powerful navy, right behind that of Italy and before Egypt. Maintaining a navy and developing sophisticated defense technology for just $19.1 billion (2024) would be extremely impressive, but the $19.1 billion not only funds Taiwan’s navy but also its army, air force, and marines.

A Taiwan Navy instructor points at the control room during a media tour of the domestically produced corvette class vessel Tuo Chiang at the northern city of Keelung, Taiwan, on Jan. 7, 2022. (Sam Yeh/AFP via Getty Images)

Impressively, with a defense budget of just 2 percent that of the United States’s 2024 $883 billion defense budget, Taiwan is able to field a 169,000 man army that is close to 40 percent the size of the U.S. Army. Taiwan’s reserve force of 2.3 million is the third largest in the world, dwarfing the United States’s reserve force of 799,000. While Taiwan has only about one-seventh the number of combat aircraft in the United States, it is still ranked No. 8 in the world when it comes to fielding fighters and attack helicopters.

In terms of overall firepower, as determined by the Global Firepower index, Taiwan comes in No. 23. And all of this for a budget less than what it costs the U.S. Navy to build three Zumwalt cruisers for which the Navy is still trying to justify their existence by spending hundreds of millions of dollars on top of the tens of billions the Navy spent to build them to carry still unproven hypersonic missiles.

However, it must be acknowledged that comparing Taiwan with the United States is not an apples-to-apples comparison. After all, Taiwan, with its limited budget and the looming threat of communist China, does not regularly spend billions of dollars on weapon systems upgrades that it intends to soon retire or scrap. Taiwan does not spend trillions of dollars on fruitless nation-building exercises like the United States did in Afghanistan. Nor does Taiwan leave billions of dollars of equipment behind for its enemies to repurpose and sell to terrorist organizations when it leaves a country. Moreover, Taiwan is not spending billions on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives and green programs that actually make its military weaker and less lethal.

Instead, Taiwan, a country facing a genuine existential threat, is spending its defense dollars to buy weapon systems like Tuo Chiang-Class corvettes that give it the most bang for its buck. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the United States.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.