Taiwan buys 400 anti-ship missiles for defense against China
US-Taiwan Business Council Chairman Rupert Hammond-Chambers told Bloomberg that Taiwan will buy up to 400 ground-launched Harpoon missiles to repel a future Chinese invasion.
The ROC had previously purchased Harpoon missiles for its fleet, but the currently purchased version is designed for land-based platform launching. So it is directly an anti-invasion weapon.
According to Bloomberg, “the Pentagon announced the $1.7 billion contract with Boeing on April 7, but did not mention Taiwan as the buyer,” at a time of tension between the United States and China due to the intensification of military exercises Chinese around the self-governed island.
As stated in Monday's statement : The Harpoon contract was cited by members of Congress, including Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, as part of a whopping $19 billion in "backlog sales." of the United States to Taiwan which, they say, must be accelerated”. In addition to the Harpoon, the list includes the F-16 Block 70 fighter, the MK-48 torpedo, the M109A6 Paladin self-propelled howitzer and the Stinger missile.
The US-Taiwan Business Council confirmed the transfer of the Harpoon.
Meanwhile, on the same day, the Chinese military announced it was conducting "major military activity" in the Yellow Sea off the coast of Shandong province.
Although these exercises have been scheduled for only a few hours, they follow a series of large days-long encirclement exercises threatening Taiwan that have been going on since earlier this month, when Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen met with the US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California's Simi Valley, a meeting against which Beijing issued a strong warning.
The Harpoon is a relatively old subsonic missile, given that the first versions date back to 1979. The weapon has been continuously updated and we are now at version 2, but it is still a weapon that is affected by time. Taiwan has developed its own supersonic anti-ship missile, the Hsiung Feng III, with a range of 400 km, therefore much greater than the Harpoon, and which can also be launched from the ground or even from armored bunkers. This homegrown missile has been in accelerated production since 2017.
Hsiung Feng III on land mobile launcher
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The article Taiwan buys 400 anti-ship missiles for defense against China comes from Scenarios Economics .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/taiwan-acquista-400-missili-antinave-per-la-difesa-contro-la-cina/ on Wed, 19 Apr 2023 09:00:30 +0000.