Taiwan Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

adeptitus said:

Google article titled "GAO says F-35 costs to hit $1 trillion" from March 12, 2009.

If the US was to sell the F-16's, they'd probably do it on Obama's 2nd term.

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Whatever the term... I do no think Obama and the USA are in a position of selling military aircrafts to the ROC now, with hundreds of billions USD in chinese borrowings, they made recently...

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kliu0 said:

Taiwan may build its own submarines

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Wow, a lot of people have an extremely low opinion of Taiwan's shipbuilding capacity! In any other country such an undertaking would never draw this much criticism. It seems strange that their is such strong resistence to a made in Taiwan solution rather than having to jump through hoops to buy submarines from overseas.

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Semi-Lobster said:

Wow, a lot of people have an extremely low opinion of Taiwan's shipbuilding capacity! In any other country such an undertaking would never draw this much criticism. It seems strange that their is such strong resistence to a made in Taiwan solution rather than having to jump through hoops to buy submarines from overseas.

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If you're talking about the previous defence minister's comments, I think that was because he was trying to get support for the US-foreign build, which was then stalled in the Taiwanese legislative. I think there is a lot of support for the idea of a Taiwanese-built submarine in Taiwan.

This is interesting news, certainly. I will wait until it becomes part of government policy and money is provided for it as the article could be wrong. But if it does go ahead it represents Taiwan's best chance of new submarines.

What is key is whether it can get the US and/or European support for the internal systems. It's all very well if Taiwan can make the hulls, but if they're filled with noisy crap all it'll do is create some jobs! But that's a risk Taiwan may have to take.

kliu0 said:

Well, Taiwan has built alot of container ships and luxury yachts (one of its main industries). They've also built the Oliver Perry Class ships when the US allowed them for sale. CSBC have already built a hull of a submarine, I say why not let Taiwan build a submarine? Once we learn to build em, we can build em ourselves and just buy submarine armaments and tech gear instead of buying whole subs which can piss off China. Of course this process will be very expensive and could be deadly, but its always worth the effort, as Taiwan becomes more isolated. Taiwan can only truly rely on itself to make things work.

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It is very difficult for a nation that never built submarines before to start building them; the trials and tribulations of Australia's Collins-class submarines is a prime example of this. And the Australians had the help of the Americans and the Swedish and still had major issues.

I too was going to mention the Collins Class. Starting sub building from scratch is exceedingly difficult. Taiwan has the technological capability but putting it all together is going to be tough and probably overbudget. I think that this program is too important not to go forward though. Diesel electric subs and stealthy well-armed missle FACs are going to be the future of Taiwan's sea based defence.

The Australian Navy had spent considerable amount of time and effort to fix Collins class sub and Adelaide class FFG upgrade projects. ROCN could benefit from a tech transfer, without having to reinvent the wheel. Only question is are the Australians willing, and what kind of price tag they'd put on the technology.

I am not a military expert or politician....but i can confidently say that australia will never give sub tech to taiwan. Think about the repurcusion from china....too much to lose on trade and relationship.

Autumn Child said:

I am not a military expert or politician....but i can confidently say that australia will never give sub tech to taiwan. Think about the repurcusion from china....too much to lose on trade and relationship.

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I think you're right. Australia's trade is too closely connected with China to help Taiwan out, at least directly. It's more likely that if Taiwan received assistance it would be from the US or Europe. The former can get away with arms sales/technology co-operation with Taiwan, whereas the latter isn't so dependent on China that member states would definitely pass up the opportunity to make indirect sales.