Ballistic Trajectory—China Develops New Anti-Ship Missile
Andrew S. Erickson, “Ballistic Trajectory—China Develops New Anti-Ship Missile,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, China Watch, 4 January 2010.
China’s anti-ship ballistic missile programme is showing signs of maturing. The missile could potentially deter or in wartime disable US carrier strike groups in the western Pacific. The development of the missile may motivate countermeasures from the US and other regional militaries.
It seems a cliché to cite Sun Zi’s maxim “in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.” Yet, this universally accepted approach does seem to correspond to Chinese military planning. Nowhere is this more true than in such ballistic missile developments as its anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) programme, one of several weapons designed to exploit relative Chinese military strengths against relative military weaknesses of the United States.
Through this approach, China is working to make it more difficult for the US to intervene militarily in China’s maritime periphery. An ASBM, if developed and deployed successfully, would be the world’s first weapons system capable of targeting a moving aircraft carrier strike group from long-range, land-based mobile launchers. This could make defences against it difficult and raise the prospect of potentially highly escalatory strikes against launchers or associated targets in China.
However, there are various obstacles that could limit China’s ability to deploy ASBMs effectively, particularly the issues of joint service operations and information usage. Further, the missile deployment could act as a significant escalation in military rivalry and may only prompt US forces to deploy countermeasures rather than prevent carrier strike group employment. …
PLA ASBMs are apparently part of China’s asymmetric ‘assassin’s mace’ arsenal targeting vulnerable chinks in the US carapace of military dominance. The author points out the likelihood that instead of deterring PACOM’s CVBG deployments in the western Pacific, Chinese ASBMs could trigger a series of counter-ASBM measures by US forces. This would be a logical response.
Similarly, when US BMD/NMD deployments threatened to neuter China’s modest strategic offensive arsenal’s deterrent efficacy, the PLA began considering more cost-effective countermeasures (these have been listed in some details by analysts such as Dingli Shen from Fudan University, Shanghai) than simply building up its ICBM arsenal to overwhelm the US BMD shield. However, given the latter’s current limited scale and scope and the modeesty of the 2nd Artillery’s strategic arsenal, this latter option should not prove beyond Chinese means should Beijing choose that path. The PLA’s January 2007 ASAT test, and the much more recent ABM launch, suggest that one party’s apparent advance will be countered by the other with defensive countermeasure. So, where does that leave the analyst community?
Well, underneath the layer of the visible, the processes generating the current strategic systemic fluidity merit some attention. As the leaders of America’s closest strategic Asian allies -Japan, Australia and India, have noted in recent months, they believe the USA will remain the pre-eminent global and regional power for several decades, but its primacy, its ability to shape the security architecture and lead the power order, will be eroded in relative terms by ‘the rise of the others,’ to quote Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani. As the 2009 Australian defence white paper makes clear, with the US’s marginal productivity advantage over China shrinking, China’s larger workforce will eventually trump America’s technological edge. Niches aside, it will not make sense for analysts to consider the USA and China in simply and starkly competitive terms, although some in both countries – and elsewhere – will continue to do so. Even strongly pro-US commentators outside China increasingly acknowledge that an intervention against what Beijing considers its core interests could be faced with measures which would impose costs that would eventually be considered not worth America’s while. So, perhaps over the next couple of decades, America’s margin of military adavntage would slowly erode to the point that by 2035, the PLAN and the US Pacific Fleet would come round, tacitly, to a division of labour which Admiral Timothy Keating, then Commander PACOM, confirmed (to me on the sidelines of the Shangri-la Dialogue in Singapore on 31st May 2008) had been suggested to him by Admiral Wu Shingli, Commander, PLAN, during Keating’s visit to China in May 2007.
The ‘rise’ of several secondary powers to a status of growing autonomy – China, Japan, india and Russia in particular – appears inevitable and not amenable to containment fallacies. The challenges such rise faces are more internal to the respective states’ endomorphic dynamics than external impositions. So, America’s primacy is very likely to erode into a pre-eminence within a more multi-polar order. This transition is potentially turbulent, but judging by what the US National Defense University has been saying about systemic fluidity and America’s strategic future, there is much to hope about the wisdom of America’s intellectual (and not just ‘hard power’) leadership in managing this transition. Comopetition need not degenerate into bloody conflict; ASBMs need not engage CVBGs, and lives need not be lost to limited gains.
So, looking at some of the processes underway at the systemic level, my inherent anxiety is moderated somewhat with a leavening of faith in the ability of the human intellect to adapt to changing circumstances.
The development of the PLA anti ship missile is inevitable.China aint trying to challenge the US but to make sure in a showdown,the PLA will have the means to deter the US ac.Flasback to the 50s and 1996 the Chinese were forced to back down in the face of overwheleming military superiority.
Now it’s a different game. Granted the US would still prevail but assuming the worst case scenario,and there is a war over Taiwan it aint going to be so easy for the Penatgon.For starters if all US carriers were deployed,I am sure 90 % of them would be sunk.Of courese China could be pulverised but the the conus will be subject to PLA retaliation and enormous/unacceptable will be inflicted .
Btw US crew on board US carriers wont be laughing like they did when tomahawks were launched at targets at Iraq. The PLA will make sure this would be their last laughter.