CHINA WATCHUkraine’s Lesson for Taiwan: Build Big, Cheap and Numerous Cruise Missiles

By David Axe

The best thing about Ukraine’s new Flamingo, a 6-ton carbon fiber monstrosity with a secondhand turbofan engine and basic guidance, is that it’s cheap. One of the cruise missiles may cost just US$500,000.

Taiwan should pay attention.

The first Flamingo raid, on 30 August, was modest. Three of the ramp-launched missiles damaged parked Russian hovercraft in Crimea, 100 km from the front line. But Fire Point plans to churn out hundreds of Flamingos a month, potentially reshaping Ukraine’s campaign of deep strikes targeting Russian air bases, rail nodes, factories, oil refineries and other strategic targets.

Could Taiwan copy Ukraine’s approach and manufacture thousands of inexpensive cruise missiles to help defeat a Chinese invasion force? It depends on whether Taiwanese developers can take the Ukrainian approach and design a missile that trades some accuracy and survivability to keep down costs and maximize the size of the war stock.

It’s far from clear that Taiwan is poised to husband its own flock of Flamingos. But it’s not hard to see how, with a little effort and a lot of political will, the island democracy could build up its own massive deep-strike arsenal, one that could seriously complicate Chinese movement in the event of a war across the Taiwan Strait.

But given the escalating tensions across the strait, Taipei should move quickly to hatch its own Flamingos. It should develop its own big and cheap strike missile.

Taiwan does already have strike missiles, including 1,200-km Hsiung Feng 2Es, which weigh 1 ton or so. same institute that developed the Hsiung Feng 2E, the National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, is also working on a much smaller 800-km cruise missile based on the Barracuda-500 from US firm Anduril.

The problem is cost, of course. We don’t know exactly how much a Hsiung Feng 2E costs these days or how many Taiwan has bought since the first flew in 2007. But it’s telling that one 2018 contract no more than 100 Hsiung Feng 2Es was valued at $440 million. Taipei has reportedly capped the cost of its Barracuda-type small cruise missile at a little more than $200,000 per round.

The small missile is clearly the most producible of the two, but can it combine massive firepower with ease of manufacture, as the Flamingo apparently does? When manufacturer Fire Point’s engineers first sketched the Flamingo last year, the company’s goal was to arm Ukraine with a big missile in huge quantities.