China's new bridge-forming barges offer new options for Taiwan invasion

Japan Times

15-04-2025

If anyone was wondering what Chinese troops and armored vehicles disembarking onto Taiwan's shores could potentially look like, then footage of drills in China's southern Guangdong province showing barges equipped with interconnected landing bridges might provide a clue.
Posted briefly last month on the Chinese microblogging site Weibo, the images show how three specially designed Shuiqiao-class barges can be linked up one behind the other to form a long, relocatable pier that extends from deeper waters nearly a kilometer out at sea onto a beach.
The trials, held near the city of Zhanjiang, suggest Beijing is not only working on new tools to ramp up its amphibious sealift capacity, but also devising ways to overcome the limited number of suitable locations for amphibious landing operations in Taiwan, as the barges could enable Chinese troops to disembark at a wider range of locations across the self-ruled island.
'This relocatable pier system can deliver large volumes of (personnel), equipment and materiel into unimproved amphibious landing areas, damaged or blocked ports, or possibly across seawalls or other obstacles onto coastal roads,' according to a report published by the U.S. Naval War College's China Maritime Studies Institute.
With a total of five areas around the barge where roll-on, roll-off ships could dock alongside, the relocatable pier could potentially transfer hundreds of vehicles ashore per hour, wrote the authors of the report, J. Michael Dahm and Thomas Shugart.
The barges also feature retractable legs that can be lowered onto the seafloor to lift the entire vessel out of the water. The legs function like massive stilts forming a raised, stable platform that is less subject to the influence of currents or waves.
China regards Taiwan as a breakaway province and has vowed to unite it with the mainland, either by negotiations or through force.
Taiwan's military planners have long considered the island's geographic characteristics — including the rugged terrain that restricts the number of beaches suitable for amphibious landings to fewer than 20 — as key elements of their defense strategy.
But Beijing's latest engineering feat could prompt them to partially reevaluate their plans, especially as the newly developed vessels appear meant for the China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy to use.
'Based on their function, paint scheme and lack of automatic identification system (AIS) transmissions, the barges are very likely PLA Navy auxiliaries and not civilian vessels,' wrote Dahm and Shugart.
Images of the first three landing barges emerged in January, but Beijing appears keen on expanding this capability as soon as possible, with the authors of the report saying that a second, identical set of three is already under construction in southern China.
This, the experts argue, suggests the PLA may have significantly advanced its timetable to field sufficient capabilities for a large-scale cross-strait operation against Taiwan.
'This newest logistics capability is further evidence of the PLA's efforts to meet Chairman Xi Jinping's reported mandate to have military capabilities necessary to conduct a large-scale invasion of Taiwan by 2027,' they wrote.
Some top U.S. military commanders have repeatedly referred to that year as Xi's "preferred timeline' for annexation, pointing to a secretive directive from Xi calling on the PLA to be ready. It's important to note, however, that no public evidence has emerged that Beijing is planning to invade Taiwan by 2027.
Just how prepared the PLA will be two years from now will also depend on the combined — and growing — deterrence and defense capabilities of Taiwan, the United States and like-minded countries such as Japan, which could make it difficult for the PLA to launch an invasion, let alone conduct a successful one.
Notwithstanding the debate about Beijing's sense of urgency, experts stressed that while the new barges, also known as landing platform utility (LPU) vessels, do expand China's invasion toolkit, they are not the type of assets the PLA would use to initiate an amphibious assault, particularly in highly restricted and potentially contested areas.
'These landing barges are probably too vulnerable to spearhead an amphibious invasion of Taiwan,' Shugart, a former U.S. Navy submarine commander now with the Center for a New American Security think tank, told The Japan Times.
The vessels wouldn't just be vulnerable to attacks from land, air and sea, but also to underwater mines in the 'surf zone,' or the shallower parts of the water close to shore, which would have to be cleared before any landing.
'If a Shuiqiao barge were damaged or destroyed, for example, that might neutralize the landing capability of the entire three-barge composite pier system,' Shugart added.
The part to be played by these vessels would come at a later stage, Shugart and his co-author noted, namely after PLA amphibious armored brigades or airborne troops established a secure location for an 'amphibious landing base.' The barges would then come in to enable the transport of other forces, such as heavy combined arms brigades.
'Landing forces are always vulnerable to shore defenses,' said John Bradford, a naval expert and executive director of the Yokosuka Council on Asia Pacific Studies, adding that the key to an invasion is to
achieve the right mix of speed and mass.
'In wargames, Chinese forces are consistently able to establish a beachhead with amphibious and airborne forces, but they are sometimes unable to amass enough forces to fight their way beyond the beach,' he said. 'These systems can change that equation.'
More details are expected to emerge in the coming months and years as the PLA puts the vessels into service and uses them in increasingly complex exercises.
One thing is already clear, though: Their development, experts say, alongside China's growing integration of military, paramilitary and civilian resources, reflects the PLA's rapidly growing capabilities to conduct a large-scale, cross-strait operation sooner rather than later.