MICRO-CLASS MISSILE ASSAULT BOAT SWARM TACTICS EFFECTIVENESS IN THE TAIWAN STRAIT

Abstract

Taiwan resolves to maintain peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait while the People’s Republic of China’s rising military capability has challenged the status quo. As a result, Taiwan’s military aims to develop asymmetric warfare capability and build up a credible deterrence. Among the new assets in production, the 45-ton micro-class missile assault boat (MicMAB) is designed to carry two anti-surface warfare missiles, and the concept of employment is focused on its stealth, terrain masking, and swarm tactics. The thesis’s objective is to analyze the MicMABs’ swarm effectiveness against adversary warships in the Taiwan Strait using Hughes’s salvo equations and the agent-based modeling tool Map Aware Non-Uniform Automata. In the scenario of 60 MicMABs engaging 50 heterogeneous warships, the results indicate that 60 MicMABs can take 45 adversary warships out of action on average. If selective targeting is not an option due to a lack of sound intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, it is recommended to assign each MicMAB to shoot whichever target is closest. When in direct engagement, the attrition of the MicMABs is high, nearly 35, but taking a high-degree terrain-masking route can successfully lower the attrition to approximately 18.