Taiwan denies China’s claim of ability to sink US Navy aircraft carrier

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Taiwan has rejected China’s claim that it could easily sink the US Navy’s most advanced aircraft carrier strike group, as Taipei seeks to bolster public confidence and fight back a persistent Chinese campaign of intimidation.

In a paper published in May, researchers at the People’s Liberation Army-backed North University of China said a war game showed that an attack with 24 hypersonic anti-ship missiles would “definitely kill” a fleet led by the USS Gerald R. Ford. Se” will sink. ,

The findings are the first time that a Chinese simulation of hypersonic attacks on a US aircraft carrier has been made public. The simulation used the Dongfeng-20 and Dongfeng-26 ballistic missiles, which are known as “carrier killers” because they are designed to target moving naval vessels.

Taiwanese national security officials have dismissed the findings, which were reported by Chinese and Hong Kong media and later picked up by some Taiwanese news outlets as part of a Chinese cognitive warfare campaign. Taiwanese military war game experts said replicas of simulations with realistic parameters produced vastly different results.

The controversy over the war games highlights concerns from President Tsai Ing-wen’s administration that China’s growing military maneuvers near Taiwan, combined with a disinformation campaign, will fuel fears of war and undermine the country’s will to defend itself. will do it.

China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has threatened to occupy it with military force if Taipei resists indefinitely. Beijing has increased air and naval exercises around the island, increased combat incursions along the unofficial Taiwan Strait median, and launched bomber and drone cruises around the island.

Chinese officials have also used traditional and social media outlets to ridicule Taiwan’s military and present next year’s presidential elections as a choice between peace and war.

Taiwan’s intelligence chief Tsai Ming-yen said in an interview this week that China’s behavior should be viewed as a “threat rather than aggression”.

Lin Chuan-kai, a veteran war game expert at the Ministry of Defense’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said that when the think-tank replicated the North University of China’s war game, the US Navy had an average of only 2.2 ships out of six. . Carrier strike groups were sunk instead of the 5.6 reported by Chinese researchers.

“They found results that they could eliminate almost the entire carrier strike group, but our results showed that they would only do minor damage. We were curious how there could be such a big difference,” Lin said.

The institute found that Chinese missiles would sink the majority of the US fleet only if the ships stopped moving, had artificially reduced hit ratios for their air defense missile systems and the carriers’ other weapons – such as electronic interference and decoy systems The attack had stopped. The weapons were turned off.

“Only if the simulation is conducted under the most extreme parameters will it yield the results reported in the Chinese newspaper, so the credibility is questionable,” Lin said in a presentation to reporters on Wednesday.

“(China) has already launched its usual cognitive warfare campaign, as they do every year,” a senior national security official said, referring to Taiwan’s largest annual live-fire military exercise scheduled for the last week of July. Bar do before Han Kuang.” ,

“As we get closer to the (January 2024) presidential election, they will ramp up the disinformation even more.”

Cao Hongsong, author of the Chinese War Games paper, did not respond to an emailed request for comment.