Carrier Killer: China’s Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles and Theater of Operations in the early 21st Century

Jeffrey Lewis 0:06

You are listening to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast, a podcast on arms control disarmament and nonproliferation. I'm Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of the Arms Control Wonk blog and a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. I have no earthly idea where Aaron or Scott are at the moment, but in their place, I am joined by two very special guests, Gerry Doyle, an editor at Reuters, and Blake Herzinger, a non-resident fellow at Pacific Forum, who are the authors of a really rad new book called Carrier Killer, the Threat and Theater of China's Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles.

How you doing, guys?

Blake Herzinger 0:45

Living the dream. Doing great, Jeffrey. Thanks for having us.

Jeffrey 0:50

Yeah, sure. So I don't know who wants to jump in first, but I guess the initial question I have is, what on earth possessed you to write an entire book about China's anti-ship missiles? Because like, I like that. And pretty much, you know, our listeners like that. But you got to admit, we're a niche group of people.

Gerry Doyle 1:14

Well, honestly, that actually goes a long way towards addressing the question of why write a book like this. Yeah, it's a niche subject for nerds like me and Blake and higher esteem nerds like you and the folks on your forum. But it's also kind of a very sort of crucial and interesting issue in terms of China's military.

And I, we thought it was important to write something that was not just informative and interesting to people who are really into this kind of thing, But also write something that's sort of maybe more widely accessible that anybody can pick up and read and enjoy, maybe chuckle at a few times and actually learn quite a bit about a really important weapon and part of China's arsenal right now.

And with the eyes of the world, well, at least until recently, focused on the Asian region militarily, it seemed like a very timely thing to write.

Blake 2:08

There's actually a really for me, there's a personal angle to this. Jerry's being very humble. He actually invited me to participate in a project that he had conceptualized. And I was actually on a U.S. Navy ship at the time, furiously researching Iranian Iranian anti-ship missiles. And this was around the same time as the Soleimani assassination in Iraq.

And this was kind of consuming all my time. Like, hey, are we gonna get shot with some sort of anti-ship missile? Researching their anti-ship ballistic missile program. And then Jerry said, hey, I have this great idea. And I was like, hey, that fits with my current extreme interests. I would really appreciate being a part of this.

Jeffrey 2:55

The current extreme interest being not getting killed by an anti-ship missile? Indeed.

Blake 3:00

Yeah. It's surprising how extreme your interest gets in that.

Jeffrey 3:04

Yeah. Well, how do you two know one another? I mean, how do you find yourself writing a book together? Because, you know, I mean, Jerry, most people would take what I guess is, you know, the pot of money and run.

Gerry 3:18

Well, I'm still waiting for somebody to offer me a pot of money. But no, the short answer is that Blake and I sort of shared relevant interests and ended up in Singapore, both of us, and kind of ended up Know, chatting on Twitter, and then Blake was like, hey, we should have a beer. And so then we had a beer. Actually, we had several beers and then continued having beers over a longer period of time and so anyway, Blake's a friend, a good guy, really smart, knows his stuff. And so like when I thought of this idea for a missile book, I said, you know who would also be great at writing a missile book is is Blake. So it's a fun, it's a fun project, and you know, I'm glad we got to do it together.

So one of the things I'm struck by is how beautiful it is.

Jeffrey 4:09

I mean, there are like illustrations and things. I mean, it's really like, I mean, it's just a, it's a beautiful object. Is that what you imagined when you started out? I mean, were you always planning on writing something that would be so accessible and vibrant? Or, you know, at some point did you think, you know, I think like 700 pages of turgid text would probably do it.

Gerry 4:35

Well, you know. The missile diagram. The diagram here and there. I mean, I don't know. From my journalism background, I know how important it is to be able to explain things visually when you can. You know, everybody enjoys, everybody who buys a book is going to have interest in reading it, obviously. But anything that you can do to further people's understanding and interest in the subject matter, you know, graphics and illustration go a long way toward doing that.

You know, range is an easy one to explain, for instance. Instead of saying, well, this missile can fly 1,500 kilometers, if you draw a map and draw a circle of 1,500 kilometers, like, oh, this missile can hit Indonesia or whatever. And then that sort of helps them understand why it's important, something like that. And honestly, like, the publisher, Yuion, was really, really aggressive and interested in getting as many sort of Illustrations and photos and graphics in there.

They know their audience. They know who's buying their books. This sort of thing was important to them as well.

Blake 5:44

They do have a great in-house illustration team. I will say that. I'm glad you like them, Jeffrey. They've put a real amount of effort with a compact team into illustrating the book. So they definitely rate a shout out. The event's been really great.

Jeffrey 6:08

Well, I'm wondering, in the course of writing the book, you ended up with this subtitle, The Threat and the Theater. And I think that's probably about right. But I'm curious if you wanted to say more about why you framed it in that particular way.

Blake 6:28

Yeah. You know, it is kind of a hinge point of the book is, you know, will they or won't they, do they or don't they? And if you look at kind of, I think, the dialogue around these missiles, as you're well familiar, it all hinges on, oh, you know, Chinese A2AD is impenetrable, you know, U.S. carrier operations in the Pacific are forever changed.

And it's like, well, Maybe, I mean, you don't even know if they work. First of all, maybe they don't either. And is A2AD real until they start firing these missiles that no one knows if they work? So that was something we enjoyed kind of tackling in the book is this idea of, you know, hey, maybe the PLA rocket force isn't this 12 foot tall juggernaut that no one can really grapple with.

You know, are the 200 missiles that we were talking about in the last DOD report, is that, that significant a capability in terms of what they could actually accomplish with those? So yeah, that, that was something we really enjoyed kind of grappling with as we worked through the book.

Gerry 7:46

Yeah. I mean, it's, it really is sort of an interesting an interesting sort of confluence of ideas and in the sense that You know, China might not know exactly how well these things work. I mean, the fact that they sort of started off testing them against static targets on land, anti-ship ballistic missiles testing against static targets on land, then static targets at sea, then a moving target at sea.

None of the sea tests, they published any, you know, video or photos or any sort of particular evidence of how well things went other than just sort of issuing statements on state media saying like, yep, it worked. But then what they actually did after those moving targets at sea was move everything back on land again, create more elaborate setups and moving ship-sized targets in the desert, which to me implies that they haven't gotten it working the way they want it to.

But despite that, it's the very idea that they have these missiles, and they want to use them against moving ships at sea. Creates an effect that the US Navy and other Western Navy have to consider when they're planning operations in the South China Sea and even farther out.

Jeffrey 9:04

Yeah, I was wondering how you assess the Chinese perception of the effectiveness of their own system. You know, and it's something I'm thinking a lot about now in a lot of other contexts, because we have that Well, I think it was a Reuters story, arguing that, or at least presenting US estimates for the reliability of a variety of Russian missile systems, including failure rates of up to 60% in some systems.

And so I I have done a little bit of academic work on this question of how new nuclear states think about reliability. And I just wonder, you know, do you think that this is something that the Chinese ultimately believe will be very reliable and so therefore they're willing to continue to make investments in it? Do you get the sense that they or maybe they have already a too high of confidence in the system or like how do you What do you think they imagine about the effectiveness of this system in kind of the short and maybe medium term?

Gerry 10:15

Well, you know, again, to me, the fact that they've moved testing back to shore implies that they don't have it working as well as they want it to. In terms of how well they think it will work in the real world, I mean, to a certain extent, your guess is as good as mine. Your guess is probably better than mine.

You're a guy who studies this stuff, and I'm just an idiot sitting in Singapore. But, you know, I think that certainly they would be paying attention to the Russian experience in Ukraine and looking at those missile failure rates. This is something I don't think Russia expected. And, you know, part of that might just be because, you know, the rest of them just were dipping deeper into their stockpiled missiles and using, you know, older stuff that hasn't been, you know, tested in a while, been sitting on a shelf and, you know, sort of dealt with flaws.

But on the other hand, you know, I think China is looking at this and probably trying to find ways to make sure that their stuff doesn't suffer a similar failure. So, I mean, the short answer to your question is that we don't really know. And I don't think China really knows either, because not only have they not done, you know, Is a target maneuvering at sea successfully.

They also, as far as anybody knows, haven't done like any kind of a full end-to-end test that includes, you know, sort of countermeasures and anti-missile systems and stuff like that. You know, the simple truth is that you don't know how well your plan is going to work until you actually try it. And I think that's that true of systems as well.

Blake, what do you think?

Blake 11:57

Yeah, no, I agree completely. And the fact that China has built a very diverse tool set, you know, at this point, and it speaks to, you know, at one point, this was a tool, the anti-ship ballistic missile was a tool that they relied upon, you know, to tackle this drastic asymmetry. You know, I'm a navalist at heart, so I'll take a chance to, you know, take my opportunity to take a swing at the anti-navalists.

You know, people said, oh, you know, the day of the carrier is over, you know, ballistic missiles are the future. But what do they do once they felt they could address that delta in that asymmetry is they built their own carriers. You know, the Chinese carrier program is ongoing. You know, they do have an effective suite of cruise missiles.

And they do have places to deploy those all over their, you know, immediate periphery. So, you know, they've now got kind of this big interlocking missile engagement zone and they've got, you know, an enormous Navy from which they can deploy sophisticated cruise missiles and incorporate the threat of those ballistic missiles. So if they work, if they don't work They have so many more tools at their disposal now that it's not the linchpin that I think it may have been 15 years ago.

Jeffrey 13:18

Yeah, I have to say one thing that I particularly like about the book is you give me at least a paragraph on one of my favorite subjects of all time, which is the total torment and torture of the America, the carrier that the US sort of tried to sink. I mean, I know a lot of the results of that are still classified, but I just...

I wonder how you think about the different interlocking technical pieces of this puzzle, the accuracy and just ISR requirements of targeting a carrier, the question of how much payload you could actually put on the carrier with a missile, and then this sort of almost an understandably unknowable question of just how vulnerable our carriers are. I mean, I wouldn't...

You know, if it turns out there's a, you know, like just hit it here spot, I mean, I'm glad that's not, not widely, though, but it did seem like it was pretty, you know, they ended up having to scuttle the America. So I, I just, I wonder how you think about all those pieces? I mean, one of the things I like about the book, of course, is that you really do, you walk readers through that, and I'm, you know.

Maybe if you do a little bit of that now, it'll encourage people to plunk down their hard-earned, I don't know, dollars. I've been in Singapore. What is the currency in Singapore? It's the dollar, Singapore dollar. It is the dollar. I'm sorry, Singapore dollars. You're right.

Gerry 14:51

I'll let Blake address the question of the weapon effects on a carrier. I think you raised a really good point about ISR and stuff. The ISR and targeting and the speed of the targeting cycle, that stuff is all super important, maybe even just as important as the way the missile itself functions. It's not all that technically difficult to design a missile that can hit a small target.

That's the capability that military all over the world is developing, all the way down to Iran and North Korea, for instance. All right, so if you can hit a small target and then expect it to hit a small moving target, well, that's a little more difficult. You still need an aim point, but if you put the right kind of seeker on the warhead, you can conceivably hit a target that's moving.

But the real problem with hitting a moving target is knowing where that target is to begin with. And the longer range system you're talking about, the longer the flight time is and the more difficult the ISR problem becomes. Satellites are going to solve some of that, but even then, satellites might have to deal with weather. You don't always have continuous coverage over every area.

Your enemy can mess with your satellites. There's all sorts of ways to deal with that. Airborne ISR gets shut down in a modern engagement. You're going to have your subs listening in. You have undersea networks. The fact remains that you have to know where you're targeted. You have to know What direction it's heading, and what speed it's going at.

And the longer it takes between when you have that information and when you launch the missile, the bigger the circle becomes of where the target might be. Because maybe it's not traveling in a straight line. Maybe it's turning. Maybe it does a 180-degree turn. So if you just leave the target, you're going to miss by a huge amount of geography.

And the bigger that targeting circle becomes, the more missiles you have, Have to fire to have an effective chance of hitting it. And that's not even taking into account, you know, again, countermeasures, you know, anti-ballistic missiles and so on. So the ISR issue is In a way separate from the missile, but it's entirely involved. It's a huge part of how effective they are.

And it's not really clear that that's been addressed. And it was certainly a problem for Russia and Ukraine. It seems like they were hitting a lot of empty fields or unused On your buildings and things like that. Maybe some of that was due to failures of the missiles themselves and maybe some of it with ISR problems. But then you also have the problem of if you do get a beat on the ship, if you do have a missile zeroing in on it effectively, what happens when you hit it?

And I'll let Blake handle that one.

Blake 17:51

An interesting question, kind of, you know, is there a, you know, here to blow up ship? we've tried really hard to build ships not that way for quite some time. I mean, but looking back to, you know, the Battle of Jutland and exploding battlecruisers, you know, it's happened in the past. things sometimes don't go the way you plan.

But an aircraft carrier at 100,000 tons made of steel, quite a few decks there. Even ordnance screaming in from space is not going from the top through the bottom. So you would have to be pretty lucky if you even hit one to sink one. And I think the America test is probably one of the greatest examples of that.

Obviously, we didn't hit it with a missile from space. They're pretty resilient. We've tested pretty much everything we have on them. We test them by setting off huge explosions next to them. So they're designed to survive things like that. Of course, the big concern At this point in our Navy's development is a mission kill for carriers that have been in service for decades in some cases, hitting a critical piece of equipment, putting a hole in a flight deck that can't be repaired.

And that's part of this kind of bigger conversation now with the Navy thinking about, well, where would these missiles, you know, be hitting our carriers? Where would we have to get the carrier two from there to fix it? How long is it out of action? And then even moving into larger, you know, questions of how the Navy mans its ships anymore.

You know, we have some ships that have gone to a minimal manning concept and that's fine when people aren't, you know, Trying to fight fires and being killed. And, you know, if you start cutting Manning, then things like a missile impact start becoming a much bigger deal. And then sometimes, you know, bad things just happen. Sometimes you're just very unlucky.

I mean, obviously the USS Bonham Richard, you know, burned at the pier. You know, could similar damage be inflicted by a missile? Could be. And, you know, could we have, you know, I guess I'm sure this happens in lots of organizations that use this metaphor, but, you know, all the holes in the Swiss cheese line up that day and just everything goes wrong.

Like, oh, we had the water turned off to do maintenance and the sprinklers were actually broken anyway. And the guy who's supposed to ring the fire alarm was set, you know, he was smoking. And, you know, and then the guy who sets a fire with oily rags or, you know, the ballistic missile that comes in, you know, they just...

It's a bad day, and so again, there's a, there's just so many unknowns, and one of the big things that's been effective, and, and I think that the the PLA has done this effectively, is use that nebulous information environment to their advantage because right now obviously the Navy has to plan for a missile that works because they don't know that it doesn't work, and obviously you don't want your first bad day to be when you find out they do work.

Gerry 21:10

Yeah, I mean, and it should be noted as well, like, you know, Russia just lost an amphibious landing ship in Ukraine. I think the Ukrainian hit it supposedly with a ballistic missile using a subunit, right? So that's a good example. Like, I think that ship, that particular ship was loaded with an ammunition vehicle and had the cargo hatch, the loading hatch on the deck open to, you know, pull stuff in and out.

All it takes is one subunition out of the 50 or however many were on that SS-21 to go through that hole. And then, you know, you saw what happened to the ship next. So, you know, there's no complete way of protecting a ship. It only takes, you know, one torpedo through the thermal exhaust port. And I also wanted to, you know, on the targeting problem, I just pulled up this data.

So there's this report that came out of, Last year, the year before, the US-China Military Scorecard, Forces, Geography, and the Evolving Balance of Power from 1996 to 2017, which actually did a little bit of math on how many missiles it would take to hit a US surface ship, ballistic missiles. And so if the kill radius of the missile, in other words, the amount of sea that it sees when it unmasks its seeker and starts looking for a target, Is one quarter of the size of the entire targeting location of the ship.

In other words, the area that ISR has determined the ship is going to be in. If the missile kill radius is one quarter of that size and you want a guaranteed kill, a 1.0 probability of kill, You would have to fire 49 anti-ship ballistic missiles that direction. And the number of DF-21D launches is probably in the neighborhood of 24.

They might have a dozen or so more sort of sprinkled throughout. But you're basically talking about using every single DF-21D to try to achieve the highest probability of getting a US service ship. So it's not a trivial problem, assuming That math is accurate. And I will assume that math is accurate because I don't like doing math. So I'm going to trust somebody else to do that.

But so the, the, the point again, being that even, even if the missile itself works as advertised, the the, the stuff that's needed to get it where it needs to be in order to hit a ship let alone, you know, kill it or mission kill it. It's pretty substantial.

Jeffrey 23:52

So I have to say, it's one of the things that I like about the book and, and, Something I think is is nice for the podcast is that, you know, I think you're very even handed in laying out all of the challenges with making something like this work, all of the reasons that even if it even if they do get it working the way that they'd like, you know, they're still going to have real limitations.

And so, you know, you don't, I think, ever Lapse into a kind of exaggerated caricature of these systems, which, I mean, honestly, you'd probably sell more books if you did. But at the same time, you don't dismiss it, right? You do take it seriously as a capability that the Chinese are developing. And I think that's a tough balance to strike.

I thought you did a very good job of it. So I guess that fundamentally though leads us to the question of like, so in fact, I think this is a title of a chapter, right? Something like, where do we go from here? So where do we go from here?

Gerry 24:57

Well, you know, you're right. Nobody likes a room temperature tick, but until there is an actual hot war, I think that's what we're going to be left with, right? Sort of a lot of, Educated guesses and reasonable assumptions about what this system can do, how the Chinese plan to use it, and what effects it might have on Western circus fleets.

So where do we go from here? I mean, I think that the short answer is that the West has to respond to this, like Blake said, as though If we're a fully functioning system that will do exactly what it's supposed to do. You don't win wars by just sort of brushing off threats and say, ah, it'll never work.

We don't need to worry about this. And, you know, Blake might be able to elaborate a little more on, you know, how the Navy, the U.S. Navy and Western Navy might respond to that. But I mean, that's basically my conclusion is that the book's conclusion is that, you know, whether or not the missile works exactly as advertised is something now that the West has to take into account.

And that is a measurable effect on its own.

Blake 26:16

Yeah, and I think one of the big things to acknowledge, you know, we kind of talked about the tools in a toolbox approach before. I mean, you know, they didn't stop, obviously, with the DF-21 Delta. You know, the DF-26, you know, the big brother, you know, the Guam killer, if we were writing volume two here, you know, Know, they can really reach out, and if you're thinking about the Pacific in terms of just this vast space does it make more sense to chase, you know, a couple ships around this entire empty ocean, or does it make more sense to try and blow up where those ships can stop and get food and hand people off and do what they need to do at home and I think you.

When Jerry was talking about the targeting problem, you know, they went from shore to sea back to shore and, you know, the carrier on a rail. You know, also what we've seen are mock-ups of, you know, piers and port facilities. Ships at the pier, it turns out, are a lot easier to find and shoot than trying to... At the Ukrainian discovery, right?

Jeffrey 27:18

Yes.

Blake 27:19

Yeah, thanks to the Russian PAO that put that on the news. Was, that was great. Oh, sweet, Pier Five. All right, hey guys, you know, like and it is, you know, it's a great, it's a different environment in terms of information. You know, we've seen this also in the Middle East. You know, we assume that there are very accurate maps out there that people are using to fire stuff that, you know, anyone can look at so.

Know, and the DF-26 isn't the only one. The, the DF-17, as you know well, know, Jeffrey you know, this hypersonic glide vehicle is out there some big new cruise missiles, extremely long range, and so you know, there's still the eggs in one basket approach is over, you know, there's this very proliferated set of capabilities that the, that the PLA RF is.

Very interested in keeping and maintaining. And the fact that they can range Guam now, I think, puts the U.S. in a real quandary because that's, you know, I don't really doubt their ability to hit Guam. Assuming the missile can go as far as they think it can, you know, Guam's not going anywhere. It's not going to flip over.

And it is always going to be loaded with equipment and people. So it's a pretty easy target.

Gerry 28:38

Yeah, and I should also note about the DF-26. The other thing that's sort of really interesting about that going forward, I mean, it doesn't appear that China is building more DF-21Bs, which could be indicative that they don't think they need more They don't think it works great, whatever. They are building, they do have this ASBM warhead for the DF-26.

And what makes that really interesting is not just the longer range, but the fact that the DF-26 itself has this sort of hot swappable warhead section, right? So this is like another threat in itself. The DF-26 brigade could have ASBMs. It could have nuclear warheads. It could have conventional warheads. It could have all three. If you want to do anything preemptive and you have to worry about, well, am I accidentally hitting China's nuclear assets and how is that going to escalate things in an unexpected way?

When all I really want to do is take out these missiles that, as Blake said, can hit Guam. So it adds, all of this adds a lot of complexity and a lot of sort of tricky challenges to confront and overcome for the West. None of it is insurmountable in itself, but it just creates a really thorny problem that planners need to work through in a way they didn't have to say 15 years ago.

Jeffrey 29:57

Yeah, I've largely kept my own opinions to myself other than the praise for the book, which I really enjoyed. But, you know, you're tempting me strongly by bringing up one of my favorite subjects, which is the inexplicable Chinese faith that we can tell their conventional systems from their nuclear systems. I wrote a book chapter maybe... 14, 15 years ago, in which I was just sort of incredibly alarmed when the Chinese were like, oh, we could have some conventional DF-21s and we could have some nuclear DF-21s.

And I remember saying to a Chinese colleague, like, Like, are you out of your mind? And he was like, oh, you could tell the difference. I'm sure, you know, you could. No, we can't. So, yeah, the ambiguity embodied by the DF-26 just terrifies me because, you know, if you see DF-26s head out into the field, are they out there to go shoot at carriers in a conventional sense?

Or are they, you know, the Chinese, you know, doing something else? So... I always like to ask about the process of writing, since I've now written a couple of books. And boy, howdy, is that something. Was there anything in the process that you discovered that surprised you, that tickled you, that frustrated you? I'm just curious about how it came together.

Blake 31:25

Well, this was certainly my first book co-authoring experience. And it was an immense help that, obviously, Jerry is a professional word writer in his day job. So that was immense. And Eddie was there on occasion when I was behind. Like, hey, you are behind. It would be better if you were not behind. Yeah. And obviously made many of my dumb words into smart words along the way, which was really great.

But it was a lot of fun. Writing, at least for me, has kind of always been the thing that I enjoy doing, like the work that I do when I'm not doing the work that I get paid to do, the fun work time. I had a blast. There's so much effort that goes into it. Even just finding pictures, obviously, of some of this stuff was difficult, which isn't writing, but it's part of bookmaking.

And yeah, it was a blast. I'd do it again.

Jeffrey 32:31

I would like to say that the research, a.k.a. Finding pictures, which is part of the bookmaking, is an integral part of my writing, which is to say it is absolutely how I procrastinate.

Gerry 32:45

Yeah, I mean, I would say, first of all, Blake is being far too humble. His words were plenty good before I met him. He's a talented guy. He knows the subject matter. And it was really easy to work with him. You know, like for me, it's a little bit different because I mean, this is my day job.

I write and edit professionally. And so writing and editing a different thing wasn't all that far out of my comfort zone. But I really enjoyed being able to sort of dig into a subject. In depth in a way that you don't necessarily get to do with daily news or even sort of larger projects. I mean, when you have 60, 70, 80,000 words to work with, you get to do a lot more.

And it was fun being able to learn more myself, being able to talk to a lot of smart people who sort of were interested in the same subject matter. And assemble it all into something that I hope people are going to enjoy reading. It was a really fun experience.

Jeffrey 33:51

Well, that was a fantastic conversation. So for listeners, the book is Carrier Killer, The Threat and Theater of China's Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles. And it's written by Gerry Doyle and Blake Herzinger, who I am so grateful joined me to talk about it. Thanks for talking to me, guys. It was our pleasure. Thanks for having us.

Blake 34:15

Thanks, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey 34:17

Well, that was a really great conversation. And I hope you enjoyed it, listeners. If you like the Arms Control Wong podcast and want to support us in what we do, you can go ahead and become a supporter if you go to patreon.com slash ACW podcast. You can support our work and get access to our Slack channel, which often gets picked up in the news and stories reported by people like Jerry.

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