force-multiplier

— 2 —
Characteristics and Capabilities of China’s Antiship Cruise Missiles
PLA Navy ASCM Inventory 1
This chapter surveys the importance of ASCMs for modern naval combat, the types of
ASCMs China possesses, their heritage and development, and their performance parameters.
China has succeeded in importing and producing—both under license and not—a wide
range of Soviet/Russian cruise missiles as well as developing its own variants. Less clear is
the extent to which the PLA has prepared to integrate cruise missiles into complex combined
arms or joint campaigns by practicing battle damage assessment and strengthening C4ISR
hardware and software through operational deployment and exercises.
China’s ability to deploy ASCMs with sophisticated performance parameters forces
potential opposing navies to be able to defeat those missiles, which may be very difficult.
An ASCM that is supersonic and sea-skimming in its terminal phase, for instance, will
evade the detection of a ship and its missile defenses until it breaks the radar horizon
approximately 16–18 nm away, leaving little time for the target to react. The U.S. Navy
would have to employ a variety of complex, layered, hard and soft measures. Hard measures
involve using missiles such as the vertically-launched SM-2 to attempt to shoot
down incoming cruise missiles. Soft measures involve point defense using chaff blooms
and electronic countermeasures (ECM). Targeted spoofing measures such as ECM are
particularly challenging as they require knowing and exploiting the incoming missile
seeker’s radar and homing logic. For all these reasons, Chinese ASCMs impose significant
peacetime costs on potential opponents who must develop countermeasures, and they
could greatly complicate the operation of enemy maritime forces in wartime.
With regard to overall cruise missile development, China has perhaps made the
greatest progress regarding ASCMs. Here Beijing has truly developed comprehensive
indigenous capabilities that approach world-class levels in many areas. As the 2011 DOD
report emphasizes, “The PLA Navy has or is acquiring nearly a dozen ASCM variants,
ranging from the 1950s-era CSS-N-2 to the modern Russian-made SS-N-22 and SS-N-
27B. The pace of ASCM research, development, and production within China has accelerated
over the past decade.” 2 This progress offers not only increasingly effective means to
threaten U.S. carrier strike groups (CSGs) and other surface platforms, but also supports
future missile development financed by potential international commercial sales (and
possible codevelopment, for example, with Iran). 3 In the analysis of William S. Murray at
the Naval War College, the PLAN, rather than focusing on torpedoes as foreign historical
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