The best thing about Ukraine’s new Flamingo, a 6-tonne carbon fibre 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 maximise 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 tonne 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.
‘We purposefully aimed for low cost,’ Fire Point chief technology officer Iryna Terekh told Militarnyii, a website for the Ukrainian defense industry. The low cost allows large purchases and potentially massive barrages.
The Flamingo’s unjammable inertial navigation isn’t particuarlyaccurate; Fire Point expects any one missile to strike within 15 metres of its aimpoint. And the Flamingo’s old Ivchenko AI-25TL turbofan engine makes it fast enough at roughly 1,000 km/h, but doesn’t lend it a lot of maneuverability to improve survivability.
Fire Point found an undisclosed number of not-quite-time-expired AI-25TLs, which propel Ukrainian-made Aero L-39 training jets, in a landfill; they had just enough flight hours left on them, after light refurbishment, to propel a hefty missile on a three-hour, one-way mission.
For many targets, the shortcomings of any one missile shouldn’t matter much when the warhead is so powerful—and when Ukraine could eventually fling dozens of the missiles at a target at a time. ‘We don’t need more precision,’ Terekh said, ‘because greater accuracy will mean the use of expensive equipment, which will lead to a decrease in the quantity in production.’
It’s unclear whether Taiwan is sitting on a pile of nearly expired jet engines as Ukraine was. It’s worth noting, however, that the Taiwanese air force and the government researchers may have tried reverse-engineering the General Electric J85 engine, whose basic design dates from the 1950s. Each of Taiwan’s F-5 fighters, the last of which retired last year, had two J85s.
A J85 could be just the thing to propel a Taiwanese version of the Flamingo if Taiwan were willing to embrace a less-than-perfect missile whose greatest attributes were payload and price.
To make a dent in Chinese logistics as an invasion fleet sailed across the Taiwan Strait, Taiwanese forces would need to launch a lot of land-attack missiles fast. The strike planners’ problem in overcoming air defenses would be an order of magnitude harder than anything Ukrainian officers must contend with.
‘The Kremlin simply does not have enough air-defense systems to protect thousands of potential military and energy targets spread across 11 time zones,’ Ukrainian-American analyst David Kirichenko wrote.
But the most important Chinese targets for Taiwanese cruise missiles would be ports, air bases and headquarters in a much smaller area right across the strait. China can concentrate thicker air defenses in the target zone than Russia can—meaning Taiwan might have to strike with more missiles to get the same effect that Ukraine aims for.
Ukraine also has time that Taiwan doesn’t. Russia’s wider war on Ukraine is grinding towards its fourth year with no end in sight. A war over Taiwan could be settled in weeks or even days. How many launch teams would Taiwan need to form to launch thousands of missiles in such short order? And how would it coordinate them under withering Chinese fire?
The reckoning may come soon. US intelligence has long assumed 2027 is a likely year for a Chinese invasion attempt. If Taiwan is going to raise up a vast flock of Flamingoes like Ukraine is doing, it needs to start now.
This article has been corrected to state that the Flamingo is made from carbon fibre, and to reflect new information regarding the warhead’s components.