Taiwan Will Have 10 Minelayers by Year-End and Six Aging Minehunters to Clear Them
Six more Min Jiang-class fast minelayers are due from Lungteh Shipbuilding by the end of December, which takes the ROC Navy from four hulls to ten. Each boat carries between 32 and 64 Wan Hsiang mines and lays them from fixed tracks amidships and aft. Run the full fleet at two sorties apiece and Taiwan can put somewhere between 640 and 1,280 mines across the approaches to its harbours in a matter of days.
That is a serious obstacle for an amphibious force. It forces the PLA Navy to slow down, sweep, and take losses before anything reaches a beach, which is exactly what a defender wants from a weapon that costs a fraction of what it destroys.
Laying the mines was never the hard part.
The other half of the cycle has no budget line
Taiwan’s mine countermeasures fleet is four Yung Feng-class minehunters built in Germany in 1991 and two secondhand Yung Jin-class boats from the United States. Six hulls, the youngest of them thirty-five years old. They can clear coastal water under permissive conditions, meaning calm seas, a known minefield, and nobody shooting. Rocket-rising mines, anti-sweep features and target discrimination are beyond them.
There is no replacement coming. The NT$35.85 billion contract to build a new minehunter class collapsed with the Ching Fu scandal in 2017 and nine years later no successor program has been announced. Every other part of the naval modernisation roadmap has moved. Ten light frigates were approved in February. The navy has said it wants 1,500 unmanned surface vessels. The Chien Lung-class upgrade is essentially finished, with Hai Lung through its sea trials and qualification shots using SUT and Mk-48 training rounds, and Hai Kun fired two training Mk-48 Mod 6 rounds from its own tubes in May. Mine clearance is the one line nobody has filled in.
So Taiwan is buying a great deal of capacity to close its own ports and almost none to reopen them.
Hormuz is running the experiment right now
The useful thing about the strait crisis is that it has turned a planning assumption into observed data.
Iran started mining the Traffic Separation Scheme in the first seventy-two hours of the war. What followed was six months of degraded traffic in a waterway that normally handles around 130 transits a day, with insurers pulling war-risk cover, thousands of seafarers stranded aboard ships that could not move, and prewar volumes never once restored. Last week CENTCOM announced it had finished clearing sea mines from the internationally recognised shipping routes. Its commander described the conditions as dangerous and difficult, which was an understatement offered by a service that had just spent months of hull time on the job.
Five days later American forces struck two Iranian launchers on Larak Island because IRGC crews had been observed loading mines onto rockets.
That is the whole lesson in one sequence. Clearing a strait took the best-resourced navy on earth several months of dedicated effort, and reseeding it takes an afternoon and a truck. The exchange rate runs against the clearer permanently, and the clearer has to keep winning while the layer only has to try occasionally.
Now transpose that to the Taiwan Strait and make it worse. American minesweepers in Hormuz worked without contested airspace overhead and without a satellite constellation cueing anti-ship missiles onto them. Taiwanese minehunters would be working inside the PLA’s reconnaissance envelope, on charted approaches to known ports, in the middle of a missile campaign. They are slow, lightly armed and easy to find. A reasonable planner assumes several are gone before clearance begins.
Kaohsiung is the number that matters
More than 60 percent of Taiwan’s container throughput moves through Kaohsiung. The island imports most of its fuel, most of its food inputs and all of the munitions it does not build itself.
Mines do not check flags. A barrier laid to stop a landing force also stops the tanker bringing diesel, the reinforcement convoy, and the navy’s own ships trying to sortie. If the clearance capacity cannot keep pace with the laying capacity, a defensive minefield becomes a blockade that Taipei imposed on itself and cannot lift.
The counterargument is that this problem only exists if the landing is repelled, in which case the war is effectively over and the ports can be cleared at leisure. That does not survive contact with how these campaigns actually run. A cross-strait conflict is not one assault that either works or fails. It is a sustained blockade and bombardment in which the deciding factor is whether Taiwan can be resupplied over months, which is precisely the thing a mined harbour approach prevents.
An island that cannot reopen its own ports has not bought time. It has spent it in advance.
What Han Kuang has not tested
President Lai watched the 53rd Engineer Group rehearse mine deployment at the Port of Taipei during this year’s exercises. The deployment half gets the photographs. The clearance half gets no public exercise time at all, and neither does the authorisation question underneath it.
Pre-conflict mining works far better than mining under fire, and it is also the single most escalatory thing Taipei could do short of shooting. Nobody has said publicly where that decision sits or who makes it. If the answer is that mines go in only after hostilities start, then the drills should show minelayers working under air and missile attack instead of at a pier in daylight.
Three things would close the gap. Exercise clearance under combat conditions, with degraded communications and the assumption that some MCM hulls are already lost. Announce a replacement program with a date on it, because every year of delay makes the imbalance worse. Rehearse the political authorisation chain between the Presidential Office, the defence ministry and fleet command before it has to be improvised.
The pressure has changed shape while this sits unresolved
None of this is happening under obvious emergency conditions, which may be part of why it drifts.
PLA fighter sorties around Taiwan hit a three-year low in the first half of 2026. The number of days with no PLA aircraft detected at all reached a record. For the first time since 2022 there was no large-scale encirclement drill. Daily naval presence continues, with 13 Chinese ships and three military aircraft tracked on Sunday, but the pattern set after the Pelosi visit has visibly loosened in the air.
Beijing has not stopped pressing. It has moved the pressure into domains where Taipei has fewer answers. It is working on Eswatini, Taiwan’s last diplomatic partner in Africa, and it has been running enough interference in the chip supply chain that Taiwanese prosecutors are now investigating server diversion through local distributors and a listed board maker for relabelling mainland-made PCBs. Live-fire drills still appear when Lai says something Beijing dislikes, but they are staged close to the Fujian coast rather than around the island.
A quieter air picture is not a smaller problem. It is a different one, and it buys Taiwan time to fix the things that only get fixed in peacetime.
The minehunter fleet is one of them, and the clock on that has been running for nine years.