How the U.S. Navy Can Overcome China’s Aircraft Carrier-Killer Missiles

The Chinese military and China’s state-backed newspapers regularly hype and test-fire their famous so-called carrier killer anti-ship missiles.

These weapons are ostensibly capable of destroying aircraft carriers with precision-guided firepower from distances as far as 2,000 miles. 

Moving Past A2/AD

The existence of these weapons — the DF-21D and DF-26B — played a major role in the development of the anti-access/area-denial strategic framework. The U.S. wants to ensure that carriers and other platforms can attack and destroy enemy targets from great distance in a very high-threat environment.

Far-reaching, precise anti-ship missiles, however, seem to threaten that mission. 

The Pentagon, and certainly the U.S. Navy, have for years now taken this threat quite seriously, even though much is likely still unknown when it comes to the reach, guidance technology, and accuracy of these missiles, let alone their ability to hit moving targets.

In response to China’s A2/AD strategy, the Navy has clearly expressed that it can and will operate anywhere it needs to when conducting combat operations and projecting maritime power. 

There are likely some interesting and important reasons why Navy leaders feel the need and confidence to make these comments — recognizing that of course many elements of ship-defense technology are not available for security reasons.

In recent years, the Navy has made rapid, breakthrough progress in the realm of layered ship defenses — progress that means ships can increasingly see and seek to destroy potentially catastrophic threats from beyond the horizon.

Carrier Strike Groups, for instance, now operate with new generations of long-range sensors able to relay distant threat data to the ship commanders in position to take defensive action.  

Layers of Defense

A now-deployed technology called Naval Integrated Fire Control – Counter Air uses Hawkeye surveillance planes and even F-35s to function as an aerial relay node able to detect threats beyond the reach of ship radar.

NIF-CA uses an airborne gateway as a sensor to send threat data down to the ship while the attacking missile is at much safer ranges.

The aerial sensor then cues ship-based fire control to launch an SM-6 interceptor to fly up and intercept the missile.

NIF-CA was first deployed more than six years ago on U.S. Navy destroyers and has probably been upgraded since then.

Laser weapons and advanced electronic warfare capabilities are emerging that can track and jam the electronic guidance systems built into the Chinese carrier-killer missiles. 

Range enhancements have also been developed, quite possibly as a specific counter to China’s missiles and its anti-access/area-denial weapons. One example is the rapid emergence of the Navy’s MQ-25 Stingray carrier-launched refueler drone.

This first-in-kind sea-launched drone can basically double a fighter jet’s attack reach by fueling the aircraft hundreds of miles away from the carrier deck. Unlike a large, vulnerable tanker, the MQ-25 is small, sleek, and of course much less risky to deploy, since it is unmanned.

In a tactical sense, this means that carriers with the MQ-25 could project power over land from twice the distance offshore, enabling sustained attack reach in an A2/AD environment. 

Biography of Author

Kris Osborn is the Military Affairs Editor of 19 FortyFive and President of Warrior Maven – Center for Military Modernization. Osborn previously served at the Pentagon as a Highly Qualified Expert with the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army—Acquisition, Logistics & Technology. Osborn has also worked as an anchor and on-air military specialist at national TV networks. He has appeared as a guest military expert on Fox News, MSNBC, The Military Channel, and The History Channel. He also has a Masters Degree in Comparative Literature from Columbia University.