TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — A video surfaced on Chinese social media Thursday showing a new type of barge that could support large-scale amphibious landings of Chinese tanks and troops on Taiwan's coast.
News broke in January that China is constructing a fleet of barges that have long support legs and road bridges extending from their bows for offloading materiel. The video on WeChat shows three of these “jack-up barges” linked in tandem at an unidentified beach, per The War Zone.
Tom Shugart, an adjunct senior fellow with the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, said on X that three of the barges have left China's Guangzhou Shipyard International on Longxue Island. Shugart dubbed the vessels T-LPT, for “civilian-crewed auxiliary landing platform — transfer.”
Shugart said the barges are “fully self-propelled landing ships.” He made this conclusion based on the presence of dual pilothouses and radars.
The analyst said the vessels have what appear to be six pilings that can be lowered to the seabed and “jack this vessel up,” thus the term jack-up barge. In addition, the barges appear to have two folded-up ramps that can be lowered to enable roll-on/roll-off, or RoRo, ships to transport their vehicles to shore.
In the video that was released on social media, the three barges appear to be connected. This would give them a combined length of about 850 meters, estimated Shugart.
The War Zone pointed out that the high profile of the barges would make them a “very static high-value target.” Therefore, the news site concluded that such vessels would be deployed after the initial amphibious landing to provide subsequent forces and supplies.
On Friday, Taiwan Security Monitor posted a new map that shows additional locations along Taiwan's west and east coasts that could be vulnerable to Chinese amphibious landings with the aid of RoRo ships and barges. This could mean that in addition to “red beaches,” considered ideal for amphibious landings, Taiwan would need to also deploy forces to these areas, potentially spreading its troops thin.
