China's Carrier Killer

Bill Gertz' "Inside the Ring" column this morning contains news of an impending release of a new report outlining the dangers to the East Asian security balance arising from China's development of the Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile known as the DF-21, a subject that has been well-covered in this blog, probably better than anywhere else. At the risk of covering old ground (and covering it poorly), I have a few thoughts to offer.

1. This is a threat that we'd better be prepared for. Putting aside for a moment the tedious "we're never going to fight China" crowd, we'll almost certainly have to fight China's weapons (my former colleague Paul Nagy at OSD Net Assessment has done some great thinking on this subject) used by other countries.

2. We need better intelligence on this system. There are a lot of classified assumptions that have significant programmatic (i.e. dollars) ramifications. For instance--the radar cross section of the missile/re-entry vehicle is an important thing to know. From this we derive a considerable number of variables, such as radar sensitivity and power/cooling requirements that are entering arguments for ship construction. Over-estimate its stealth and you overspec the requirement. Underestimate it, and you're left with an expensive target. See #4

3. The second part of Gertz' article speaks to China's (and the US) growing fascination with global strike. I have written elsewhere of my affinity for global conventional strike, only to be nay-sayed by those who believe it to be de-stabilizing (i.e, the other guys won't know if a NUKE is being shot or a conventional weapon). I don't mean to downplay the counter-argument--it is something we need to deal with. I would only say that I never hear ANYONE EVER raising this issue in relation to CHINESE weapons development. A DF-21 starts its flight path looking like any other ballistic missile, nuclear or not. There are obviously other factors that our systems would evaluate in order to determine what was shot--but there would almost certainly be some period of uncertainty after launch. Are we playing by the Marquess of Queensbury rules while some other set applies to China?

4. The DF-21 threat is a classic case driving the fielding of ensembled, networked missile defense capability, and the Navy must especially grasp this concept. If it chooses to pursue countering this threat in a platform (i.e. ship) based manner, it will truly build gold-plated ships that would make even today's CGX projections look tame. The response to the threat must be looked at across a broad architecture, with "risk" shared among a number of platforms/systems. Continuing to break the "sensor to shooter" chain should be among the most important on-going R and D goals in the Navy.

Bryan McGrath