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The Carrier Killers
Why China’s hypersonic missiles are a “holy s**t
moment” for the U.S. military
on the 70th anniversary
of the founding of the Peo-
ple’s Republic of China, President
Xi Jinping was categorical about his
country’s future. “No force can stop
the Chinese nation and the Chinese
people from forging ahead,” he said
in front of thousands of people in
Beijing. It’s widely recognized that
China intends to supplant the U.S. as
the world’s biggest and most techno-
logically advanced country: That’s
part of why President Donald Trump
is, for better or worse, waging a trade
war with China. Less well understood,
but no less true, is that China seeks to
become the world’s dominant military
power as well—and has
made significant strides
toward that end. In a
speech last week, retired
Admiral William McRa-
ven, the former head
of U.S. special forces, called China’s
intensifying military build-up “a holy
shit moment for the United States.”
The most visible and, for U.S.
defense planners, most troubling
evidence of China’s military advance
comes in the form of hypersonic mis-
siles, commonly known as “carrier
killers.” Beijing claims the weapons
can hit surface vessels like aircraft
carriers, and though that hasn’t been
proved, Pentagon planners worry.
Hypersonics are much faster than
cruise missiles and fly at different tra-
jectories than ballistic missiles. They
glide. That makes current U.S. missile
defense systems, aimed at identifying
and knocking down ballistic mis-
siles during their parabolic flight
paths, useless.
China’s rapid progress on hyper-
sonic missiles took the Pentagon by
surprise. Spending last year on radar
and sensor systems capable of defeat-
ing hypersonics amounted to just $
million, “a rounding error by Penta-
gon standards,” as Loren Thompson,
defense analyst at the Lexington Insti-
tute, a defense and security think tank,
put it. The budget for hypersonic
defense is being ramped up signifi-
cantly now, but Michael Griffin, the
Pentagon’s top technology planner,
says any system won’t be deployed
before the middle of the
next decade.
For U.S. war planners,
the strategic signifi-
cance of China’s carrier
killers are huge. Beijing
wants to displace the U.S. military
from the Pacific. Naval forces, of
course, are the main way the U.S.
projects power in the region—with
aircraft carrier groups the most vis-
ible component of that force. But
the inability to detect hypersonics in
flight makes carrier groups extremely
vulnerable to them. “This really
strikes at the heart of America’s place
in the world, of America’s role in the
world, in terms of power projection,”
says Thomas Karako, director of the
Missile Defense Project at the Center
for Strategic and International Stud-
ies, a Washington think tank.
The closest the U.S. and China came
BYBILL POWELL