Two US warships sail through Taiwan Strait in challenge to China

Destroyers William P Lawrence and Stethem transited through the waterway on Sunday as Pentagon ups the ante with Beijing

Reuters

The guided-missile destroyer USS Stethem, pictured, sailed through the Taiwan Strait with USS William P Lawrence on Sunday. 

The US military has sent two navy warships through the Taiwan Strait as the Pentagon increases the frequency of movement through the strategic waterway despite opposition from China.
Sunday’s voyage risks further raising tensions with China but will likely be viewed by Taiwan as a sign of support from the Trump administration amid growing friction between Taipei and Beijing.

Taiwan is one of a growing number of flashpoints in the US-China relationship, which also include a trade war, US sanctions and China’s increasingly muscular military posture in the South China Sea, where the United States also conducts freedom-of-navigation patrols.
The two destroyers were identified as the William P Lawrence and Stethem. 

The 180km-wide (112-mile) Taiwan Strait separates Taiwan from China.
“The ships’ transit through the Taiwan Strait demonstrates the US commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” Commander Clay Doss, a spokesman for the US navy’s seventh fleet, said in a statement.
Doss said there were no unsafe or unprofessional interactions with other countries’ vessels during the transit.
Taiwan’s defence ministry said the US ships had sailed north through the strait.
“US ships freely passing through the Taiwan Strait is part of the mission of carrying out the Indo-Pacific strategy,” it said in a statement.
There was no immediate comment from China.
The United States has no formal ties with Taiwan but is bound by law to help provide the island with the means to defend itself and is its main source of arms.
The Pentagon says Washington has sold Taipei more than $15bn in weaponry since 2010.
China has been ramping up pressure to assert its sovereignty over the island, which it considers a wayward province of “one China” and "sacred" Chinese territory.
It said a recent Taiwan Strait passage by a French warship, first reported by Reuters on Wednesday, was “illegal”.
Beijing’s concerns about Taiwan are likely to factor strongly into this year’s Chinese defense budget, following a stern New Year’s speech from Xi Jinping, threatening to attack Taiwan should it not accept Chinese rule.
China has repeatedly sent military aircraft and ships to circle the island on drills in the past few years and worked to isolate it internationally, whittling down its few remaining diplomatic allies.

China's Type 055 Warship vs. America's Stealth Zumwalt-Class Destroyer: Who Wins?

By David Axe

On Oct. 15, 2016 in Baltimore on the U.S. East Coast, the U.S. Navy commissioned the guided-missile destroyer USS Zumwalt into service following a protracted and costly development.
Six hundred feet long and displacing 14,500 tons, Zumwalt — the first of three stealthy land-attack destroyers — is America’s largest surface combatant in generations.
But she’s not alone in her weight class. 

While the Americans were celebrating Zumwalt’s entry into service, on the other side of the world at a shipyard in Shanghai, the Chinese navy was hard at work on its own 14,000-ton-displacement surface warship.
The Type 055 just began major construction and probably won’t enter service before 2018. 

But when she does, she could be the biggest and most powerful surface warship in Asia.
It’s unclear exactly what the Type 055 will do, but indications are that she’ll function as the main air-defense escort for China’s new domestically-built aircraft carrier, currently under construction at Dalian in northern China.
Consider the Type 055’s superstructure facets, apparently meant to support radar emitters similar to the SPY-1 emitters that are part of the U.S. Navy’s Aegis air-defense system. 

U.S. Navy flattops never go anywhere without at least one Aegis-equipped cruiser and several Aegis destroyers as escorts. 

Zumwalt, notably, is the first new major American surface combatant class in 30 years not to have Aegis.
The Type 055 likely won’t be a direct competitor of Zumwalt. 

Rather than integrating Zumwalt and her two sisters into carrier battle groups, the U.S. Navy will probably deploy the giant destroyers on solo cruises near land in order to take advantage of the vessels’ radar-evading hull-form and their twin, 155-millimeter guns, which can fire projectiles a distance of at least 80 miles in order to support amphibious landings and special operations.

Zumwalt’s designers traded missile capacity for durability. 

The Type 055’s originators stuck to traditional design principles, maximizing firepower at the cost of damage-resistance.
In many ways, the Type 055 is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. 

Largely conventional in form and function, the Type 055’s major innovation is, simply put, her size.
Zumwalt, on the other hand, pushes the boundaries of warship-design and could potentially open up new operational concepts. 

Not since the age of the battleship have navies deployed large warships close to enemy shores for the purposes of bombarding targets on land. 

Radars and guided missiles made the mission too dangerous for today’s flimsy, easy-to-detect surface combatants.
The Type 055 will probably do for China what the Aegis cruisers and destroyers — nearly 100 of them — are already doing for the United States. 

That is, protecting the carriers. 

Zumwalt, however, could make near-shore fire support possible again — a feat the Type 055 surely can’t duplicate.
It could turn out that sheer size is the only meaningful characteristic America and China’s respective 14,000-ton surface warships have in common.