Taiwan Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter Gollevainen
- Start date
Mr T
Senior Member
Here's the actual article.
"The first of the eight new vessels will be delivered by 2025...."
The Taiwanese government has always made it clear that only the prototype will be ready by 2025. Perhaps the first version of the article was mistranslated or the writer confused themselves and only realised after publishing it, requiring a rewrite.
Also delivered does not necessarily mean commissioned. I've read other reports about commissiong in 2026, not 2025. We're talking about half a decade's time, no one can say with absolute clarity how the timetable will have progressed by then.
If it satisfies both US and Taiwanese requirements it's unlikely to be a turd. The US wants Taiwan to have a viable submarine fleet a lot more than it's concerned about a push for the USN to reacquire diesel-submarines. After all these are being assembled in Taiwan, not a US shipyard.
That's why the plan for new submarines didn't go anywhere for over a decade, because previous Taiwanese governments wanted new submarines but didn't want to risk a domestic project going wrong due to the bad PR. US shipyards would have been the only likely place the work could have been done, and the USN was against the optics of seeing diesels being assembled next to their nuclear boats. They were worried Congress would go "oooh, so you can build these cheaper submarines - we can cut your budget accordingly". Also given that it seems to be a hybrid of the Oyashio and Soryu class, there's even less reason for the USN to feel threatened by this.
The Taiwanese IDF project was limited by the difficulty of getting an advanced engine approved for sale. Whereas here reportedly the US has offered the AN/BYG-1 suite for the new submarines, and the Mk48 and UGM-84s have been previously cleared for sale. That doesn't mean there won't be problems during manufacture that will require fixing, but in terms of internal hardware and weapons there's a lot less reason to be pessimistic compared to the F-CK-1.
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Another piece of expensive junk that Republic of China is buying.
Skywatcher
Captain
$16 billion (minimum) for eight SSKs?! WTF is the ROCN and Taipei smoking?
Is there some scheme to run up such a large Taiwanese debt in hopes that it will deter Beijing from reunification?
I imagine there's a pretty big development and R&D cost, being the first sub they're building. For example, setting up sub construction yards, large steel rollers... I'm not sure how much is in common with regular shipbuilding.
Skywatcher
Captain
The AP report (I'll dig up the link) said that only about $500 million USD was spend on R&D, and the sub yard can't cost more that a couple times that amount.
Mr T
Senior Member
Could be that the "project cost" is lifetime costs, not the pure cost of building the boats. It looks like the $16 billion figure was reported by AP and then repeated by other media groups, so it's not possible to be sure. If someone can find a statement or budget report by the MND it might put the issue to bed.
The only other comparison I can think of right now is the ROKN's indigenous submarine project, where it was reported that the cost of each submarine would be around $900 million. That might not include weapons, and South Korea would find it much easier to procure equipment than Taiwan would.
The MND classified the items they needed for the submarines red, yellow and green. Red were things they needed to buy from outside Taiwan and yellow were things that would be difficult to get but could be produced domestically. If the cost is as high as AP reported, I expect it's because of yellow-classified items that Taiwan will be making domestically for the first time.
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I see that the new Australian Attack class submarine build cost for 12 units has jumped from $50 billion to $80 billion ($US56 billion).
The two types of submarines are not comparable, but a new class of submarines is not cheap to design and develop, as both the Taiwanese and Australians are discovering.