The bulk of the United States’ cruise-missile defenses are on warships, such as
Arleigh Burke-class destroyers equipped with Aegis — an advanced suite of radars, command and control computers and anti-air missiles such as the Sea Sparrow, SM-2, SM-3 and SM-6.
This is a formidable defensive weapon system … when your enemy doesn’t have a lot of missiles to throw
atyou. In fact, the Navy designed these systems for engaging a relatively small number of incoming missiles at
longranges. This makes the SM family large, heavy and expensive. Another problem is that the ships’ launchers — the Mark 41 VLS — cannot be rearmed at sea.
A single
Arleigh Burkedestroyer has around 90+ air-defense missiles. But not every missile will hit its target. In their report, Gunzinger and Clark note that an attacker could expend 32 anti-ship missiles — at a cost of less than $100 million — to deplete a destroyer’s entire compliment of SM-6s (worth $300 million) given a 70 percent success rate on the part of the defending ship.
That doesn’t include the cost of the destroyer, which is about $2 billion. And all it takes is a single missile to either sink the ship, cripple it, or render it out of action for weeks or months. Even if the destroyer survives, it must return to port and rearm. All told, this tactic means China could, in effect, bankrupt the U.S. Navy over time.
China’s missiles are getting smarter. The YJ-18, in particular, is a very
. Having only appeared in China’s arsenal within the past few years, the YJ-18 can travel 290 nautical miles, most of the way at a speed of 0.8 Mach. But once the missile closes toward a target — and within range of a defending vessel’s weapons — it dumps one of its “stages” and accelerates to a speed of Mach 2.5.
Which makes it difficult for its intended victim to track and destroy it.
However, there is a way to stop China’s missiles from delivering a knockout blow to the U.S. military in the Western Pacific, but it will take years and be expensive, too. The solution is also … complicated.
The main takeaway from the report — the United States can no longer take it for granted that long-range missile interceptors will do the trick. Instead, Gunzinger and Clark propose a mix of tactical tricks and new technologies, including electromagnetic railguns with guided high-velocity projectiles, air-defense lasers and guided artillery rounds like the kind
.
To make it harder to target U.S. forces, the report suggests dispersing bases when possible and hardening existing ones to force China to expend heavier, more expensive and longer-range weapons of its own. To strike the missile launchers before they fire, the authors want drones — lots of them — and stealthy bombers (like the B-21) that can penetrate China’s air defenses.
The United States wouldn’t have to
abandonair-defense missiles — it just can’t depend on expensive, longer range variants. Electromagnetic weapons would be enormously expensive to develop (with manufacturing costs in the tens of millions of dollars each), so these will likely be less common than lasers, high-powered microwave weapons
andshort-to-medium range missiles that can be fired en masse.
If this vision ever comes to pass, it would be a major conceptual shift in how the Pentagon conceptualizes anti-missile defenses. Navy warships today include close-in weapons such as Phalanx to hit missiles during the seconds before they strike, but this is a last resort.
