China has “the world’s leading hypersonic missile arsenal” that can threaten U.S. Navy ships, according to the Defense Department’s most recent report on Chinese military power.
Hypersonic weapons fly at between five and 10 times the speed of sound, and their ability to change course mid-flight makes it difficult to shoot them down.
Over the past 20 years, China’s military has “dramatically advanced its development of conventional and nuclear-armed hypersonic missile technologies,” including the YJ-21 hypersonic missile, which is designed to target aircraft carriers, the Defense Department’s report says.
The report does not include an estimate of how many hypersonic missiles are in the Chinese military’s arsenal, and a Pentagon spokesman was unable to provide any additional information on the matter.
A primary fear that U.S. warplanners have of hypersonic weapons is the threat they pose to U.S. Navy ships. Current Navy defenses are designed to shoot down drones, attacking bombs, and cruise and ballistic missiles. But those defensive systems may be less effective against hypersonic weapons, which fly as low as planes, travel as fast missile and maneuver on their way to the targets. They pose a risk to ships ranging in size from aircraft carriers to destroyers and increase the likelihood that the Navy would suffer losses in a conflict against China not seen since World War II.
To face Chinese hypersonic missiles, a U.S. Pacific Fleet Spokesperson said the service has a variety of capabilities “to deter, defend against, and, if necessary, defeat aggression,” without providing specific details.
“We are a professional maritime force – ready to respond to any contingency at any time – whether that aggression is against the U.S. or one of our allies and partners,” the spokesperson said in a statement to Task & Purpose. “Additionally, we are investing in mission-critical capabilities of our own including hypersonic weapons, advanced ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] platforms, unmanned systems, and resilient C4I [command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence] networks that directly address regional anti-access/area denial challenges and defense capabilities.”
The threat posed by Chinese hypersonic missiles also requires the U.S. military to develop new countermeasures, said Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
“President Trump has the exact right idea with Golden Dome,” Wicker said in a statement to Task & Purpose. “Using our defense reconciliation bill, we are going to accelerate dramatically the development of anti-hypersonic missile defenses. We will build everything from interceptors to capabilities that can confuse and blind the Chinese targeting sensors.”
Harder to shoot down
The way that hypersonic missiles approach their targets makes it hard to intercept them, said retired Navy Capt. Thomas Shugart, an adjunct senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington, D.C.
Unlike ballistic missiles, hypersonic weapons do not follow a predictable trajectory, Shugart told Task & Purpose, and they can maneuver in ways that make them difficult to detect and anticipate where they will hit.
“A ballistic missile is going to go up out of the atmosphere, which puts it pretty high over the horizon, and you should be able to see it on radar as soon as it goes above the horizon a pretty good ways away, depending on the type of radar you have to detect it,” Shugart said. “A hypersonic missile, on the other hand, skims along the top of the atmosphere. So, it stays a lot lower, closer to the Earth’s surface, than a ballistic missile does, which means it pops over the horizon a lot later than a ballistic missile would. So, you’re going to have less time to shoot at it, less time to have it on radar and react to it.”
All of this poses extreme challenges for Navy air defense missiles, such as the ones being used against Houthi missiles and drones in the Red Sea. But hypersonic missiles also use a seeker to home in on their targets, and that could potentially be a vulnerability, Shugart said.
The Navy could use “soft kill” defenses against hypersonic missiles to jam their seekers or use chaff and flares to throw them off target, Shugart said. Information about Navy sensors and jammers is highly classified, Shugart said, so it is hard to determine from open sources how effective such defenses would be against hypersonic missiles.
Whichever method the Navy uses to defend against hypersonic weapons, sailors will have much less time to react than they would against other types of missiles, he said.
An evolution in anti-ship weapons
For decades, weapons makers in China have had their eyes directly on U.S. Navy warships. Hypersonic weapons represent the latest technological advancement in China’s arsenal of anti-ship weapons, said Timothy R. Heath, a senior international defense researcher with the RAND Corporation.
China has long worked to build an arsenal of anti-ship cruise missiles. First developed in the 1970s, cruise missiles travel much slower than ballistic missiles and are easier for the Navy to shoot down with standard missiles and the Close-in Weapon Systems, or CIWS, Heath told Task & Purpose. Still, cruise missiles can be highly dangerous to modern ships, especially when launched in large salvos, because they are cheaper, maneuverable, and more accurate than ballistic and hypersonic missiles.
The threat of anti-ship ballistic missiles, which emerged in the 1980s, marked a revolution in China’s ability to strike U.S. Navy ships. Missiles like the DF-21D and DF-26, combine a ballistic missiles’ speed and the ability to deploy decoys that can confuse U.S. defenses. Many U.S. defense analysts recommend that the Navy keep its aircraft carriers out of range of China’s Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles.
“Hypersonic weapons offer an evolution in the threat by giving the missiles the ability to maneuver to a limited extent during the mid-course flight, which is when such missiles can travel well above Mach 5,” Heath said. “This makes the hypersonic missiles even more difficult to counter as new defenses will be needed that do not rely just on anticipating a ballistic trajectory.”
It’s possible that in a future conflict U.S. Navy aircraft carriers could have to face an attack from ballistic and hypersonic missiles simultaneously, each coming from different trajectories, said M. Taylor Fravel, director of the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Still, the U.S. military could try to disrupt the process involved in targeting and guiding missiles to their targets, known as the “kill chain,” Fravel told Task & Purpose.
“The robustness of China’s kill chain is not impervious, and, assuming that the general location of a carrier could be identified, a lot would still depend on terminal guidance and comms, which could be jammed, etc.,” Fravel said.
“We should expect to lose some carriers”
While hypersonic missiles certainly increase the risk that U.S. Navy ships would face in a war against China, no true expert would argue “100% the carrier is dead,” Shugart said.
“Quite frankly, the carrier has been under threat from one weapons system or another for generations,” Shugart said. “The difference, I think, is that the level or risk has certainly gone up.”
Despite the Navy’s countermeasures against enemy missiles, there are far more satellites in orbit now, making it easier for a near-peer adversary to target U.S. ships, Shugart said. Artificial intelligence may make it easier for China to pore through satellite images to locate Navy aircraft carriers.
China can also launch a missile attack against a U.S. aircraft carrier group from land, whereas the Soviets during the Cold War relied on Backfire bombers, which would take much longer to launch en masse, Shugart said.
As the ranges of Chinese weapons continue to increase, U.S. ships in the Western Pacific will increasingly be at risk, he said.
“If we get into a war with China, we should expect to lose some carriers,” Shugart said. “But if we got into a war with any great power, I would expect to lose some carriers. The question is: Are the objectives we’re trying to fulfill going to be worth it in the view of the American public and its political leadership.”