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New missile gap leaves US scrambling to counter China


Bangladeshpost
Published : 26 Apr 2019 08:06 PM | Updated : 05 Sep 2020 10:30 AM

China's powerful military is considered to be a master at concealing its intentions. But there is no secret about how it plans to destroy American aircraft carriers if rivalry becomes war, reports Reuters. At November's biennial air show in the southern city of Zhuhai, the biggest state-owned missile maker, China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation Ltd, screened an animation showing a hostile "blue force," comprising an aircraft carrier, escort ships and strike aircraft, approaching "red force" territory.

On a giant screen, the animation showed a barrage of the Chinese company's missiles launched from "red force" warships, submarines, shore batteries and aircraft wreaking havoc on the escort vessels around the carrier. In a final salvo, two missiles plunge onto the flight deck of the carrier and a third slams into the side of the hull near the bow.
The fate of the ship is an unmistakable message to an America that has long dominated the globe from its mighty aircraft carriers and sprawling network of hundreds of bases. 

China's military is now making giant strides toward replacing the United States as the supreme power in Asia. With the Pentagon distracted by almost two decades of costly war in the Middle East and Afghanistan, the Chinese military, the People's Liberation Army (PLA), has exploited a period of sustained budget increases and rapid technical improvement to build and deploy an arsenal of advanced missiles.
Many of these missiles are specifically designed to attack the aircraft carriers and bases that form the backbone of U.S. military dominance in the region and which for decades have protected allies including Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. Across almost all categories of these weapons, based on land, loaded on strike aircraft or deployed on warships and submarines, China's missiles rival or outperform their counterparts in the armories of the United States and its allies, according to current and former U.S. military officers with knowledge of PLA test launches, Taiwanese and Chinese military analysts, and technical specifications published in China's state-controlled media.

China has also seized a virtual monopoly in one class of conventional missiles – land-based, intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles. Under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a Cold War-era agreement aimed at reducing the threat of nuclear conflict, the United States and Russia are banned from deploying this class of missiles, with a range between 500 and 5,500 kilometres (3,418 miles). But Beijing, unrestrained by the INF Treaty, is deploying them in massive numbers.

This includes so-called carrier killer missiles like the DF-21D, which can target aircraft carriers and other warships underway at sea at a range of up to 1,500 kilometers, according to Chinese and Western military analysts. If effective, these missiles would give China a destructive capability no other military can boast. China's advantage in this class of missiles is likely to remain for the foreseeable future, despite U.S. President Donald Trump's decision in February to withdraw from the treaty in six months.

China is also making rapid strides in developing so-called hypersonic missiles, which can manoeuvre sharply and travel at five times the speed of sound (or even faster). Currently,  the United States has no defences against a missile like this, according to Pentagon officials. China's Ministry of National Defence and China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation did not respond to questions from Reuters about Beijing's missile capabilities. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the Pentagon had no comment.

THE MISSILE GAP China's growing missile arsenal hasn't yet been proven in a real-world clash, and some Chinese officials play down their advances. But under the Trump administration, Washington has come to view China as a rival determined to displace the United States in Asia. This modern-day missile gap, the administration believes, is emerging as one of the biggest dangers to American military supremacy in Asia since the end of the Cold War. The Pentagon is now scrambling for new weapons and strategies to counter the PLA's rocket arsenal.

"We know that China has the most advanced ballistic missile force in the world," said James Fanell, a retired U.S. Navy captain and former senior intelligence officer with the U.S. Pacific Fleet. "They have the capacity to overwhelm the defensive systems we are pursuing." Fanell was sidelined by the Pentagon ahead of his 2015 retirement, after warning about the Chinese build-up at a time when President Barack Obama was seeking cooperation with Beijing. Today, Pentagon policy hews more closely to his views that China intends to displace the United States as Asia's dominant power.

Chinese military brass agree they can now keep American carriers at bay. Six people in China interviewed by Reuters, including retired PLA officers and a person with ties to the Beijing leadership, said China's enhanced missile capability was a great leveler and would serve to deter the United States from getting too close to Chinese shores. "We cannot defeat the United States at sea," a retired PLA colonel said in an interview. The United States has 11 aircraft carriers and China has just two. "But we have missiles that specifically target aircraft carriers to stop them from approaching our territorial waters if there were conflict."

A person with ties to the Chinese leadership who once served in the military had a similar message: "If U.S. aircraft carriers come too close to our coastlines in a conflict, our missiles can destroy them." Xi Jinping, who has seized direct control of the world's largest fighting force, has played a pivotal role in the ascendancy of Chinese missile forces. This series, "The China Challenge," examines how Xi is transforming the PLA and challenging U.S. supremacy in Asia. He has delivered a powerful boost to the prestige and influence of the elite unit responsible for China's nuclear and conventional missiles, the PLA Rocket Force.

The Chinese leader has described the missile forces as a "core of strategic deterrence, a strategic buttress to the country's position as a major power and a cornerstone on which to build national security." Xi has brought senior missile force veterans into his closest circle of military aides as he has consolidated his grip on the PLA with a sweeping purge of senior officers accused of corruption or disloyalty.

The Rocket Force has always enjoyed strong support from the ruling Communist Party. But under Xi, the once secretive unit, formerly known as the Second Artillery Corps, has been thrust into the limelight. Since he took power in 2012 with a pledge to rejuvenate China as a great power, the Rocket Force's latest nuclear and conventional missiles have played a starring role at some of the biggest military parades held in the Communist era.

In one of these displays, in 2015, the designations of new missiles, including the "carrier killer" DF-21D, were painted on the sides of the projectiles in big white letters. The bold labels were aimed directly at foreign audiences, according to Western military analysts monitoring the parade in Beijing. At a parade Xi presided over to mark the 90th anniversary of the PLA in 2017, missiles were also prominently displayed. THE RANGE WAR

What makes Chinese missiles so dangerous for the United States and its Asian allies is that the PLA is winning the "range war," according to Robert Haddick, a former U.S. Marine Corps officer and now a visiting senior fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies based in Arlington, Virginia. While the United States was taking what Haddick describes as a "long holiday" from missile development in the aftermath of the Cold War, China was shooting for distance, developing missiles that can fly further than those in the armouries of the United States and its Asian allies.

The Pentagon has begun to publicly acknowledge that in missiles, at least, China has the upper hand. "We are at a disadvantage with regard to China today in the sense that China has ground-based ballistic missiles that threaten our basing in the Western Pacific and our ships," the former commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral Harry Harris, said in testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee in March last year.

At the time, Harris explained that the United States was unable to counter with similar missiles because of the 1987 INF Treaty with Russia, which banned these weapons. The treaty constraints have left the United States with no equivalent to weapons like China's DF-26 ballistic missile, which has a range of up to 4,000 km and can strike at the key U.S. base at Guam. China says the missile has a carrier-killer variant that can hit a moving target at sea. U.S. bases in South Korea and Japan are within range of another PLA projectile, the CJ-10 land attack cruise missile, which has a range of about 1,500 km, according to Pentagon estimates.

However, the Trump administration appears to be clearing the way for the United States to compete. On Feb. 1, Trump announced Washington would withdraw from the treaty, accusing Moscow of breaching the agreement. He said in a statement that the U.S. would quit in six months unless Russia returned to compliance. Trump also said that China had more than 1,000 missiles of the range covered by the INF Treaty. He added that the U.S. would now develop a ground-launched conventional missile that would have been banned under the treaty. This could help offset China's advantage, military experts say, but it will take time, probably years, for the U.S. to develop and deploy these weapons.

China criticized Trump's announcement, with Foreign Ministry spokesman GengShuang saying the treaty was important in "safeguarding global strategic balance and stability." Geng, however, didn't mention the PLA's own arsenal of these weapons or that China itself isn't party to the pact. He said China opposed negotiating a new treaty that would cover other nations as well as Russia and America.

This missile gap portends a military upheaval. Some powerful PLA anti-ship missiles now far outrange the strike aircraft deployed on U.S. carriers. That means American military planners are grappling with a scenario that until recently didn't exist: U.S. carriers could be obsolete in a conflict near the Chinese mainland. If forced to operate outside the range of their aircraft when approaching China, the nuclear-powered leviathans would be far less effective. Sail too close and they would be vulnerable.

Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy has been able to use its carriers to bludgeon weaker enemies, approaching close enough to launch air strikes, confident that the giant warships are untouchable. Today, in the event of conflict with China in East Asia, Pentagon planners and other regional militaries say they are wrestling with how to respond to something they haven't seen since World War Two: a return to highly contested warfare at sea.

For the U.S. military, one fear is that swarms of cheap, expendable Chinese missiles have the potential to neutralize the most expensive warships ever built. China does not publish the cost of its missiles. A modern version of the subsonic, Cold-war vintage Harpoon, the mainstay anti-ship missile of the United States and its allies, costs $1.2 million, according to the U.S. Navy. Western military officials assume China's lower manufacturing costs would mean it could build similar missiles for less. The latest U.S. carrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford, cost about $13 billion to build – about 10,000 times the price of the Harpoon.