Tainan (Taiwan) (AFP) – Silver-hulled sea drones skim across the water as part of an exhibition in Taiwan where local and foreign companies are competing for a share of surging government investment in uncrewed vehicles to deter China. As Chinese military pressure increases, Taiwan is pouring billions of dollars into aerial and sea drones, which have been widely used in Russia’s war in Ukraine and in the Strait of Hormuz with devastating effect. Taiwan’s military has said it wants to acquire more than 1,400 coastal surveillance and reconnaissance drones, over 200,000 coastal attack drones, and 1,320 one-way attack uncrewed surface vessels (USVs).
Despite political divisions over how much to spend on Taiwan’s security, the parliament recently passed a NT$240 billion (US$7.4 billion) drone defence bill, with more spending expected to be approved this month. At a yacht resort in the southern city of Tainan, sea drone manufacturers from Taiwan, the United States, and Singapore introduced USVs and uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) to Taiwanese government and other officials on Monday. USVs several metres long and capable of carrying bombs churned up the marina’s still waters as they showed off their speed and agility, while UUVs, designed to inspect the seabed, hovered below the surface.
Taiwan has “the largest procurement for USVs in the world right now…and that’s why all the companies come here,” Cathy Fang, a policy analyst at the government-backed Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology, told AFP on the sidelines of the demonstration. Taiwan aims to become an “Asian hub” for the production of drones free of Chinese components, capitalising on the island’s dominance of AI technology and semiconductor manufacturing. While Taiwan already has the know-how to make high-tech sea drones due to its experience in shipbuilding and remote-controlled toys, the island is keen to work with foreign firms whose systems are battle-tested and have better software.
In a recent deal, Florida-based Maritime Tactical Systems announced Taiwan’s coast guard will buy 25 of its USVs that will be made in the United States and Taiwan. “We’re making an investment in Taiwan,” Seamus Flatley, chief growth officer for the company, told AFP in Tainan. “If you’ve got a lot of small USVs out there doing a lot of different missions, it really takes a load off of the coast guard and the Navy and what some of their grey hull ships are doing.”
Virginia USV maker STR8 Industries CEO Phil Ho said uncrewed sea drones would enable Taiwan to “project scalable force.” Depending on the model, a sea drone can cost anywhere from thousands to millions of US dollars, and take weeks or months to build — still much cheaper and faster than a warship or submarine. That makes them a relatively low-cost “game changer” in a conflict with China, said Bryce Barros, a former US Senate national security adviser and currently at the Global Taiwan Institute. “Using USVs and UUVs are really important because they definitely complicate Chinese military operations and the calculus for it.” They can also “address Taiwan’s manpower shortage caused by its declining birth rate,” said Su Tzu-yun, a military expert at the Taipei-based Institute for National Defense and Security Research.
Global interest in UUVs has soared since the start of the Middle East war when Iran claimed control of the Strait of Hormuz, said Grace Chia, chief executive of Singapore autonomous underwater vehicles firm BeeX. “We have seen a significant increase in demand as people start to realise that you can just have a very simple mine destroy a whole entire channel, and that’s where underwater robots come in to neutralise these targets,” Chia told AFP.
Analysts warn of challenges as Taiwan seeks to integrate different types of drones into its military, get the systems to talk to each other, and operate them without access to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites that have been crucial to the Ukrainian army’s operations. “Satellite communications for USV platforms are important,” Barros said. “But that really depends on the range of operations, and matters less for operations that are in Taiwan’s near shore within its 12 nautical mile (22 kilometre) territorial zone.”
© 2024 AFP
