After years of conjecture, details have begun to emerge of a "kill weapon" developed by the Chinese to target and destroy U.S. aircraft carriers.
First posted on a Chinese blog viewed as credible by military analysts and then translated by the naval affairs blog Information Dissemination, a recent report provides a description of an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) that can strike carriers and other U.S. vessels at a range of 2000km.
As analyst Raymond Pritchett notes in a post on the U.S. Naval Institute:
"The Navy's reaction is telling, because it essentially equals a radical change in direction based on information that has created a panic inside the bubble.
For a major military service to panic due to a new weapon system, clearly a mission kill weapon system, either suggests the threat is legitimate or the leadership of the Navy is legitimately unqualified.
There really aren't many gray spaces in evaluating the reaction by the Navy…the data tends to support the legitimacy of the threat."
In recent years, China has been expanding its navy to presumably better exert itself in disputed maritime regions. A recent show of strength in early March led to a confrontation with an unarmed U.S. ship in international waters.
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