Following last month’s launch of the navy’s latest warship, the Ta Chiang, a heated debate has erupted in the media about whether the vessel can be classified as a “carrier killer,” with some claiming that it is a gross exaggeration of the ship’s capabilities.
So which side is right? Is the missile corvette a genuine “carrier killer” or not?
To find out, we must temporarily put aside the ship itself and instead focus on the missiles it is to carry: the Hsiung Feng III anti-ship missile.
The Hsiung Feng has a terminal velocity of Mach 3 and can skim less than 5m above the water’s surface. Supposing that the targeted aircraft carrier’s radar is positioned 50m above the water’s surface, its crew would, under optimum conditions, have about 40 seconds to initiate countermeasures.
In the real world, optimum conditions rarely occur. Complicating factors include weather and sea conditions, wave height, sea surface radiation, and the roll, pitch and yaw of the ship, as well as its gyroscopic alignment, radar performance, whether equipment in the ship’s operations room is on standby or fully activated, and the vigilance of the equipment’s operators.
If all of these factors are taken into account, an aircraft carrier would be lucky to have 20 seconds to react.
During this lethal time window, there is no room for a malfunction of equipment and systems, nor any form of human error.
The ship’s combat systems must accurately distinguish the target as an attacking missile, initiate tracking of the missile, lock on to the target, calculate the projectile’s trajectory, allocate the appropriate defensive weapon, ready the weapon for launch and fire it.
The ship’s defensive weapon must fire correctly, cleanly leave the ship’s vertical launch silo or weapons rack, climb to the correct height, gain speed to terminal guidance phase and hit the target.
While elements of the above sequence are automated, automation takes time.
Furthermore, if the defensive weapon is up against a hypersonic missile, and both operate at between Mach 3 and Mach 4, the difficulty of achieving a direct hit is akin to stopping a bullet with another bullet.
The key to a ballistic missile’s lethality is the speed at which shrapnel travels after impact and detonation, which can be calculated by adding the missile’s speed in flight at terminal velocity and its initial blast velocity.
If the initial blast velocity of the missile is Mach 3, the older version of the missile, the Hsiung Feng II, which is subsonic, would, on impact, discharge shrapnel at a velocity of just under Mach 4.
The Hsiung Feng III can reach Mach 3 during flight, so shrapnel would discharge at Mach 6 on impact. The increase from Mach 4 to Mach 6 might not sound particularly significant, but as a ballistic missile’s speed increases, its lethality rises in a geometric progression.
Therefore, if a warship is hit by a Hsiung Feng II, the warhead would penetrate between one and two bulkheads, and the exploding shrapnel would penetrate a further two or three.
A Hsiung Feng III warhead would penetrate three to four bulkheads and exploding shrapnel would penetrate a further three to four.
Such deep structural damage would be fatal to an aircraft carrier; it would only need to hit a fuel tank or one of the ship’s magazines to trigger a chain reaction of explosions that, if it did not sink the vessel, would cause debilitating damage.
The Hsiung Feng III is clearly a “carrier killer” missile. The 700-tonne Ta Chiang is fitted with 16 anti-ship missile silos — twice the number of a 4,200-tonne Cheng Kung-class frigate. During conflict, the Ta Chiang would carry eight Hsiung Feng III and eight Hsiung Feng II. If it fired its entire missile payload at once toward an aircraft carrier, the damage would be incalculable.
The most effective way to defend against a saturation missile attack is to sink the platform carrying the missiles before they are fired. The Ta Chiang has a stealthy design and a shallow draft, which means that it can be hidden in one of Taiwan’s many fishing ports.
Furthermore, the ship’s data link is designed to enable it to fire missiles without emitting a electromagnetic signature, making it even more difficult for the enemy to detect.
Make no mistake, the Ta Chiang is a “carrier killer.”
Oliver Hwang is a retired navy captain.
Translated by Edward Jones
US aerospace company Boeing Co has in recent years been involved in numerous safety incidents, including crashes of its 737 Max airliners, which have caused widespread concern about the company’s safety record. It has recently come to light that titanium jet engine parts used by Boeing and its European competitor Airbus SE were sold with falsified documentation. The source of the titanium used in these parts has been traced back to an unknown Chinese company. It is clear that China is trying to sneak questionable titanium materials into the supply chain and use any ensuing problems as an opportunity to
It’s not every month that the US Department of State sends two deputy assistant secretary-level officials to Taiwan, together. Its rarer still that such senior State Department policy officers, once on the ground in Taipei, make a point of huddling with fellow diplomats from “like-minded” NATO, ANZUS and Japanese governments to coordinate their multilateral Taiwan policies. The State Department issued a press release on June 22 admitting that the two American “representatives” had “hosted consultations in Taipei” with their counterparts from the “Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.” The consultations were blandly dubbed the “US-Taiwan Working Group on International Organizations.” The State
The Chinese Supreme People’s Court and other government agencies released new legal guidelines criminalizing “Taiwan independence diehard separatists.” While mostly symbolic — the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has never had jurisdiction over Taiwan — Tamkang University Graduate Institute of China Studies associate professor Chang Wu-ueh (張五岳), an expert on cross-strait relations, said: “They aim to explain domestically how they are countering ‘Taiwan independence,’ they aim to declare internationally their claimed jurisdiction over Taiwan and they aim to deter Taiwanese.” Analysts do not know for sure why Beijing is propagating these guidelines now. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), deciphering the
Delegation-level visits between the two countries have become an integral part of transformed relations between India and the US. Therefore, the visit by a bipartisan group of seven US lawmakers, led by US House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul to India from June 16 to Thursday last week would have largely gone unnoticed in India and abroad. However, the US delegation’s four-day visit to India assumed huge importance this time, because of the meeting between the US lawmakers and the Dalai Lama. This in turn brings us to the focal question: How and to what extent