Report: Chinese cruise missiles could pose biggest threat to U.S. carriers

Saturation strikes from Chinese anti-ship cruise missiles could become the biggest threat to Navy carrier strike groups (CSG), according to a paper issued by the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at the National Defense University.

The paper, “A Low-Visibility Force Multiplier: Assessing China’s Cruise Missile Ambitions,” draws from both Western and Chinese-language open source documents and concludes, “experienced Aegis warriors will respect China’s emerging capabilities.”

Written by cruise missile specialist Dennis Gormley, and China military specialists Andrew Erickson and Jingdong Yuan, the paper states that, due to the low cost of developing, deploying and maintaining cruise missiles, the Chinese believe that cruise missiles possess a 9:1 cost advantage over the expense of defending against them. China assumes that “quantity can defeat quality” by simply saturating a CSG with a variety of high-speed, low-altitude, cruise missiles.

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