China's People’s Liberation Army (PLA) maintains a sustained commitment to amphibious armor, exemplified by the discovery of a new mine-clearing variant on its successor chassis to the Type-05 series. This defies Western strategic consensus, which focuses on asymmetric measures like Taiwan's "hellscape" defense using autonomous loitering munitions against vulnerable amphibious vehicles.
The PLA's amphibious architecture prioritizes high-speed planing hulls, such as the Type-05, capable of forty-five kilometers per hour, to reduce exposure during transit across the Taiwan Strait. This speed is considered primary passive armor, as traditional heavy armor would compromise buoyancy and velocity, making vehicles more vulnerable. The PLA is engineering through drone threats by developing a system-of-systems approach, externalizing protection through uncrewed vanguards to sanitize the littoral zone. This strategy aims to overcome the "tyranny of the horizon" and enable rapid beachhead penetration, crucial for subsequent landings of unarmored civilian ferries and Shuiqiao landing barges.
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