MARK WAUCK
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AMERIKANETS
Debasification Exposes Trump's Folly
The USS Carl Vinson, 2005. In less than a quarter century, these once-formidable monsters of the sea have become strategically and tactically obsolete. Peer and near peer powers such as China, Russia and Iran have severely limited their capabilities, and turned them into potential floating coffins.
Editor's Note: WASHINGTON — More than half of the nation’s aircraft carriers are not currently ready for deployment, as the massive ships sit off the Virginia coastline in various states of repair or testing. The U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carriers, more than any other nation. Six of them are currently docked along the Virginia coast and only one is ready to deploy. Another is undergoing maintenance on the Pacific coast. The hulking warships serve as mobile airbases at sea and can allow U.S. forces to fly into areas swiftly, without a complicated process of getting permission to set up on land in neighboring nations. The carriers are supposed to be on a three-year schedule that rotates deployment, scheduled maintenance and repair, so that some carriers are always in strategic places at sea and others are ready for deployment, if a fast response is needed for a global problem.
Today the NYT is reporting that Iran’s strategy of targeting US bases in the region has been directly responsible for the resupply problems facing the USN. Now, we have long been aware of the great stresses placed on the US force projection into the region that the destruction of US radars and bases have posed. It was always a sort of domino strategy. Iran first systematically destroyed early warning radars near the Persian Gulf, which left US bases utterly vulnerable. Then the bases themselves were effectively dismantiled. That forced the US to withdraw westward to places like Jordan, but Iranian missiles followed them. US planes are now largely based in Israel or other similarly distant points. Amerikanets ably summarized the situation back on July 19:
Iranian air war strategy
The US force in the region losing access to both the first and second lines of airbases available to it at the start of the conflict is a development with profound strategic and operational consequences. Depending on how you slice it, the number of airbases from which the US would likely conduct operations against Iran prewar was around 20. Without access to bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, KSA, and Jordan, that number will be cut to around five. This will compress hundreds of airframes into just a handful of tarmacs and runways, making it impossible to get those assets into the air in the time between early warning radars detecting an Iranian MRBM launch and that missile impacting its target in Israel. With more assets on the tarmac, the Iranians are much more likely to score hits. As the Pentagon moves more assets into the region to stage for a potential ramp-up in attacks on Iran, this issue will compound.
Enter a second asymmetry: the US Axis depends on aerial refueling to generate combat power, and the distance that makes Israeli bases safer to conduct operations from undercuts refueling missions. Tankers that could have met attack aircraft for refueling missions directly over their takeoff point at Al Udeid in Qatar, for example, will now have to fly over a thousand miles to reach the southern border of Iran, and even farther if they want to avoid dangerous airspace over Iraq. This puts stress on airframes, sucks up fuel, and reduces the number of refueling missions that can be flown. These distances become extreme when considering that tankers may have to meet attack aircraft launched from carriers operating as much as 1,700 miles away from Israel in the Arabian Sea. The retreat to Israel effectively divides the US forces in the region in two, splitting USAF assets in Israel from USN assets off the coast of Oman.
The key to the American air campaign has always been to degrade Iranian air defenses to the point that cheap and plentiful glide or even gravity bombs can be used against targets in Iran. Dwindling stocks of long-range cruise missiles make this a necessity. To accomplish this, American air forces have to conduct Suppression/Destruction of Enemy Air Defenses (S/DEAD) operations, which require long loiter times with aircraft remaining in the air to respond to ISR and emissions from air defense radars. These missions are exceptionally dependent on tanker support, so any degradation of US tanker operations in turn degrades American S/DEAD capabilities.
By all available evidence, the Iranian debasification campaign appears to be working. The US force in the region is likely incapable of generating the same combat power in its air operations against Iran as it could when the war started, and things are trending ever further in a negative direction. Even worse, there’s no clear solution on the horizon. The most obvious lever for American planners to pull is to accept more casualties and losses of personnel and airframes, but this is an unprecedented step the modern incarnation of the US military has never faced.
So nearly a month ago Trump’s empty threats had been exposed. Yes, the US was still able to launch strikes, but they were unsustainable beyond a few days, while Iranian retaliation is sustainable indefinitely. No doubt the military command has been telling Trump all of this, and Trump’s public pronunciamentos are empty gaslighting. All his eggs are now in the sanctions basket. Count on that to backfire against the US and its allies. Iran, backed by Russia and China (and other countries acting discretely) will outlast Trump—perhaps to 2029. But Iran is now shifting to an offensive posture, so Trump may find himself if an even tighter box.
This brings us back to the resupply problems facing the USN out in the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean. Iran’s debasification strategy wasn’t confined to actual US bases in the Persian Gulf and westward. While radar was the priority target early on, they later struck at resupply facilities on the Gulf of Oman controlled by the UAE and Oman. That has forced US logistics to be pushed back all the way to Diego Garcia out in the Indian Ocean, 2200 miles distant from the Strait of Hormuz. But, Iran does have missiles that can reach Diego Garcia. The next phase of war may feature Iran’s new offensive posture may include determined attacks on USN ships—not just warning or harassing shots—as well as on Diego Garcia.
The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter
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BREAKING: The US Navy has shifted its main regional logistics hub 2,200 miles to Diego Garcia after Iran struck and fully destroyed the US Navy base in Bahrain early in the Iran war, directly contributing to the supply problems aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, per NYT.
Iran subsequently struck Diego Garcia on March 20 with 2 medium-range ballistic missiles, with 1 falling short into the Indian Ocean and the other shot down by a US Navy warship, with a senior Iranian source familiar with the matter saying “more is to come” regarding strikes on the island. Both US carrier liberty ports (Bahrain + Emirati Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman) are within Iranian missile range.
Because of this logistics disruption, the carrier has set a historic record for time at sea, with sailors facing exhaustion, food shortages, water contamination, deteriorating conditions, supply shortages, lack of basic hygiene products, and poor-quality rations. Multiple sailors have tried jumping overboard and attempted suicide.
The USS Lincoln crew is also eligible for 5 “beer days” under Navy tradition, given time at sea, but no beer is available due to the shortages.
Now, the debasification strategy has been effective and well within Iranian capabilities largely because US bases are stationary targets. In that sense, the USN carrier groups have a signficant advantage because they are moving targets. That advantage is effective against both cruise missiles as well as ballistic missiles—for different reasons, in both cases. That doesn’t mean that USN ships are immune from attack, which is why they operate outside the range of Iranian coastal based cruise missiles. Probably the only country today that could plausibly—but still speculatively—present a real threat to USN carriers is China. The reason is that effective strike systems against these mobile and highly defended targets require very expensive and sophisticated spaced based ISR satellite systems. My take from these considerations, and those that follow in the limited quotes, is that Iran is probably best served by targeting the USN logistics chain—now including Diego Garcia—since these are stationary targets.
For a deep dive into the question of the feasibility of missile attacks against naval assets, Amerikanets has a very recent article. Here I quote only his conclusions, so follow the link if this subject interests you:
Why Hasn’t Iran Sunk an American Aircraft Carrier?
And what’s up with anti-ship ballistic missiles?
Before getting into the meat of this question, let’s get some caveats out of the way. The only thing we truly know, because it’s been confirmed in official statements by both sides, is that the Iranians have targeted US Navy assets. We don’t know if they’ve managed to hit an American ship, and there’s no strong evidence that they have, but we can be certain they haven’t sunk one. We don’t know how many anti-ship missiles and drones the Iranians have expended in their targeting efforts. We’ll avoid speculating on the possibility of American cover-ups of damage to naval vessels in this piece.
We can’t rule out that the Iranians are deliberately withholding a catastrophic strike. In this view, they could be limiting themselves to what are effectively warning shots to keep the American naval force in the Arabian Sea at a distance. This could make sense from a strategic perspective, as it would control the rate of escalation. Striking American bases in Jordan, for example, could plausibly be construed as lower on the Iranian escalation ladder than striking an American aircraft carrier, which is the enduring symbol of American military power. It’s long been speculated that the American government would be forced to respond to the sinking of an aircraft carrier with a retaliatory nuclear strike, though there is no evidence this is US military doctrine.
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It’s plausible that the Chinese possess a reliable, operational carrier killer today, and that they’re the only nation to ever have one. But this should be regarded as a holistic system, rather than just a particular missile. All the components in a highly sophisticated and staggeringly expensive chain reaching from the launcher on the ground to ISR satellites in space must work together.
So where does this leave the Iranians? First, none of this proves Iran hasn’t chosen restraint. What it does establish is that restraint is a more logical choice than it may at first appear. The Iranians don’t have the resources to create an integrated space-based ISR system like the Chinese have. Their coastal radars have suffered attrition. They’ve made massive leaps in missile technology, but this is just one link in a lengthy chain. Their best bet for the moment is attriting American naval defenses with cruise missiles and drones, but this is a tall and expensive order. A single CSG has hundreds of interceptors capable of shooting down slower aerial threats. Its radars, unlike the terrestrial ones the Iranians have already destroyed, are mobile. And American naval forces are intentionally operating at the edge of Iranian cruise missile range. The Iranians could expend hundreds of cruise missiles without much to show for it. Perhaps the most realistic possibility for the Iranians to get an edge on American naval forces would be getting a little help from their friends. Chinese and Russian ISR could greatly diminish Iran’s disadvantages in targeting, but it remains to be seen if either state would be willing to take that risk.
Here's the full AMERIKANETS article:
Why Hasn't Iran Sunk an American Aircraft Carrier?
And what's up with anti-ship ballistic missiles?
The Iran War has so far unfolded in a way that could be described as “predictable,” or obvious. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz was predicted by many, as were Iranian attacks on Gulf oil infrastructure. The asymmetry between modern ballistic missiles and ballistic missile defense was also known and predictable based on the performance of the Patriot in the war in Ukraine. Iranian ballistic missile performance specifically—and especially their ability to penetrate Israeli and American air defenses—was well known to anyone who closely observed Operation True Promise I in April 2024. The shortage of American standoff munitions and missile interceptors was publicly known before the war. The vulnerability of MALE drones could be predicted from observing the Red Sea Crisis. Even casual observers are well aware of the battlefield revolution Iranian drone designs have triggered in Ukraine. That American and Israeli air forces would fail to establish long-term, constant, and total control over Iranian skies could have been predicted by anyone who dug closely into Israeli air attacks on Iran in 2024, or, again, the war in Ukraine.
There is, however, one glaring exception to this rule: that the Iranians have, apparently, failed to seriously damage an American naval vessel, and an aircraft carrier in particular. Given the impressive showing by Iranian missiles and the comparatively poor performance of American air defenses, this seems counterintuitive. If Iranian ballistic missiles have the capability to strike targets from hundreds of miles away with pinpoint accuracy, if they’re able to maneuver in flight, attain hypersonic terminal velocities, and penetrate the most modern and sophisticated air defenses in the world, why are American carrier strike groups able to loiter a few hundred kilometers from Iranian shores?
Before getting into the meat of this question, let’s get some caveats out of the way. The only thing we truly know, because it’s been confirmed in official statements by both sides, is that the Iranians have targeted US Navy assets. We don’t know if they’ve managed to hit an American ship, and there’s no strong evidence that they have, but we can be certain they haven’t sunk one. We don’t know how many anti-ship missiles and drones the Iranians have expended in their targeting efforts. We’ll avoid speculating on the possibility of American cover-ups of damage to naval vessels in this piece.
We can't rule out that the Iranians are deliberately withholding a catastrophic strike. In this view, they could be limiting themselves to what are effectively warning shots to keep the American naval force in the Arabian Sea at a distance. This could make sense from a strategic perspective, as it would control the rate of escalation. Striking American bases in Jordan, for example, could plausibly be construed as lower on the Iranian escalation ladder than striking an American aircraft carrier, which is the enduring symbol of American military power. It’s long been speculated that the American government would be forced to respond to the sinking of an aircraft carrier with a retaliatory nuclear strike, though there is no evidence this is US military doctrine.
What we’ll do in this piece is focus narrowly on why Iran might have a hard time hitting an American aircraft carrier, provided they were determined to do so. This is an important question, because a surface-level analysis might assume Iran’s startling ability to precisely hit static ground targets would translate to anti-ship operations. But this is not necessarily the case. To understand why, we’ll trace the history of anti-ship missile (ASM, sometimes AShM) development and the constraints of ballistic missile design.
Falling With Precision
First, it’s important to understand how the most basic form of ballistic missile functions. Ballistic missiles begin their trajectory with the “boost phase,” a powered phase that delivers all the kinetic energy the missile requires to reach its target. This is the phase in which guidance traditionally occurs, meaning the missile spends the majority of its ballistic arc falling unguided to its target. The missile’s guidance system contains accelerometers and gyroscopes. The guidance computer takes these inputs and compares them against the missile’s launch position and a predetermined, static target, finding the missile’s deviation from its desired track and correcting it using control surfaces like exhaust vanes, fins, and engine gimbals. This is called inertial navigation, and it dates all the way back to the German V-2 rocket, which used an analog computer.
Inertial guidance systems are entirely self-contained. It emits nothing and receives no external signals. Therefore, it’s impossible to jam or spoof. It doesn’t require a complex seeker, and the basic technology it relies on has existed for nearly a century. But inertial guidance has drawbacks. The sensors involved are not perfect. Gyroscopes have drift, and accelerometers have bias. There are limits to how precisely a rocket motor can be switched off, and variance in the atmosphere and even gravity across the earth’s surface can introduce error.
Decades of ballistic missile development have progressively reduced the error rate of inertial guidance systems. Missile accuracy is measured in “circular error probable,” or CEP, which is the radius of a circle drawn around the target in which 50% of the projectiles will land. The V-2 rocket had a CEP of around 15 kilometers, meaning that if the Germans fired 100 V-2s at a given target, 50 of them would land within a 15 km radius of it. This made it useful only for random terror bombings.
The Advanced Inertial Reference Sphere (AIRS) of the LGM-118A Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missile
Engineers attacked the weak points of inertial navigation systematically after the introduction of the V-2. Gyroscope quality has been improved, systems now account for the variation of gravity across the earth’s surface, launch points are surveyed with extreme precision (inertially guided submarine-launched ballistic missiles, or SLBMs, have never been as accurate because they’re launched from a mobile platform), and guidance computers are massively more sophisticated than the analog computers of the 1940s. By the 1960s, inertial guidance was more than sufficient to produce acceptable CEP for missiles used in countervalue strikes, with the massive damage radius of nuclear warheads. Modern inertial guidance systems are capable of achieving a CEP measured in the tens of meters, or even less. Radio-inertial, GPS, and stellar-inertial systems have been developed to supplement purely inertial guidance to improve accuracy.
The Problem With a Moving Target
This diagram is deliberately simplified, and doesn’t account for the target’s heading, wind, the constraints of carrier operations, and so on, but it gives us a rough sense of the problem. Within five minutes of launch, the target could be potentially anywhere within an area the size of Manhattan. Within ten minutes, that area exceeds four Manhattans. By the time 20 minutes have passed, it’s 18 Manhattans, or a circle with the approximate width of the Strait of Hormuz’s narrowest point. A Nimitz-class aircraft carrier has a deck area of 0.02 square kilometers, or 0.027% of the 5-minute target area. Even with a missile capable of hitting a postage-stamp-sized target with consistency, it would be like trying to thrust one’s hand into a haystack and find a needle by sheer luck.
The First Attempt
The Soviet selection of a passive radar seeker for the R-27K was logical. A passive seeker simply detects a radar emission—it doesn’t have to generate its own radar signal, fire it off into the target area, and wait for it to return. The round trip of an active seeker imposes power and time constraints, and requires a complex transmitter (keep in mind all of these components have to fit inside the missile itself). The R-27K likely activated its passive seeker during the midcourse phase of flight, while it was outside the atmosphere. This bypassed the need to design a seeker capable of either transmitting or receiving through the plasma sheath that surrounds a ballistic missile during atmospheric re-entry, its terminal phase.
The drawbacks of this exo-atmospheric passive radar guidance system are severe. Because the R-27K was unguided in its terminal phase, it was inaccurate. Passive radar guidance didn’t allow fine-grained target discrimination, i.e., the missile could detect an emitting target, but couldn’t identify precisely what that target was. The system still had potential utility because it was armed with a nuclear warhead. Even with poor target discrimination and a CEP measured in hundreds of meters, it could still potentially deal damage to its target. But the Achilles’ heel of the R-27K was EMCON, or emissions control. If the naval force it was targeting stopped emitting during its targeting phase, it would have nothing to lock on to. Because of the enormous speed of ballistic missile systems, and the short window for detection and navigation, even a brief interruption in emissions from the target would be enough to severely degrade the missile’s accuracy. As anti-radiation missile technology developed, naval forces increasingly began to practice EMCON.
The Case for Going Slow
The Soviets introduced the P-15 Termit (NATO reporting name: Styx) anti-ship cruise missile in 1960. The P-15 demonstrates clearly the advantages of a slower platform in anti-ship operations. An active radar seeker allowed it to hone in on a target in the absence of radar emissions. It had a short range (40 km in the initial variant). While this may seem like a disadvantage, it’s important to detail how much easier this made its job. A P-15 seeking a target 40 km away would have a flight time of 130 seconds at Mach 0.9. A target moving at 30 knots could travel only 2 km during this period, a small enough search area for the active radar seeker on the P-15 to stand a good chance of finding it once the missile exited its midcourse. In contrast, an ASBM launched from 1,500 km away has 12 minutes of flight time, and the target could travel as much as 11 km during that period. If a passive-seeking ASBM like the R-27K were lucky enough to get a good signal during its midcourse, it could have as much as five minutes of flight time remaining. During its terminal phase, it has no information about the target’s true present location within an enormous search space.
Eilat and After
Within seven years of its introduction, the P-15 had sunk a major surface vessel: the Israeli destroyer Eilat. The Eilat was effectively defenseless against this new category of weapon. It had no missile interceptors, no chaff, and no electronic countermeasures. Its sinking in 1967 by three P-15 hits (out of four fired by the Egyptian Navy) triggered a revolution in naval warfare. Navies scrambled to introduce defensive measures against this new threat. The Pakistani Navy was too slow to adapt, and lost multiple ships to Indian operated Soviet Osa-class missile boats armed with the P-15 in 1971.
The first real test of naval defenses against anti-ship cruise missiles occurred in 1973. Unlike the Pakistanis, the Israelis had adapted quickly, and they were able to weather a massive attack from Syrian and Egyptian P-15s using chaff and active jamming. Dozens of P-15s were fired, but none hit the Sa’ar-class missile boats equipped with countermeasures.
The record of the anti-ship cruise missile has been decidedly mixed since then. The famous sinking of the HMS Sheffield by an Exocet anti-ship cruise missile during the Falklands War has been justifiably categorized as a fluke. The Sheffield’s ESM was temporarily degraded while it was transmitting over satellite, and airborne early warning wasn’t active. Iraqi Exocets killed 37 American sailors aboard the USS Stark in 1987, but the Americans had no reason to think they were at risk of attack by a loose ally. Hezbollah successfully struck the INS Hanit with a cruise missile in 2006, but the Israelis claim they hadn’t turned on any defensive systems because they were totally unaware Hezbollah even possessed anti-ship missiles. Recent events may provide examples of external defenses failing. American naval vessels have been unable to protect commercial ships that may or may not be within their defense envelope, but it isn’t outrageous to claim that no unambiguous examples of an ASCM striking a critical blow on a well-prepared and defended military vessel exist.
This is because ASCMs suffer from shortcomings of their own. Active radar seekers announce themselves, allowing ECM systems to detect them consistently, and often before the missile detects its target. Chaff is highly effective against active radar seekers. Other seeker types avoid these problems while introducing others. Infrared seekers are passive, but have limited range and suffer in certain weather and environmental conditions. They can be defeated with IR decoys. Active TV guidance requires a constant datalink, which limits range and makes the system susceptible to jamming. Combining these seeker types can make a system more robust to countermeasures, but this does nothing to mitigate the most severe drawback of cruise missiles compared to ballistic systems: their slow speed makes them comparatively trivial to shoot down.
The war in Ukraine has provided all the evidence one could want of this fundamental reality. Videosof cheap MANPADS shooting down Russian cruise missiles are plentiful. Even advanced, stealthy cruise missiles like the Storm Shadow are routinely shot down by Russian air defenses.
What Iran Has
While Iranian medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) enjoy an impressive penetration rate against US and Israeli air defense systems, there’s no reason to expect this to carry over to the performance of Iranian cruise missiles against American naval systems. The difference in speed between the two types of projectiles is enormous. Some combination of raw speed and maneuvering capability makes Iran’s most sophisticated ballistic missiles a clear overmatch for the most advanced American and Israeli air defense systems. Based on the information we can verify, no cruise missile system fielded by any military enjoys this overmatch. Hypersonic cruise missiles like the Russian Zircon have yet to be used against a naval target in combat.
The Wall at 150 Miles
Clockwise from top left: SM-6, RIM-162, RIM-116, Phalanx CIWS
The defensive systems the Iranians are up against in the Arabian Sea are extensive. Two Carrier Strike Groups contain over 700 VLS cells, with a generous portion of those committed to the SM-6 missile interceptor, which was specifically designed to intercept ASCMs. Each carrier can launch multiple E-2D Advanced Hawkeye airborne early warning aircraft, which help negate low-altitude sea-skimming ASCMs by detecting them much earlier than a surface vessel could. Radar systems in a CSG are integrated, allowing vessels to launch interceptors against targets only another vessel can detect. Incoming ASCMs must first get past the SM-6, then RIM-162 interceptors, followed by RIM-116, and then finally the last-ditch Phalanx CIWS. The AN/SLQ-32 EW suite detects and jams guidance radars. The Australian Nulka system deploys active decoys designed to draw the guidance systems of ASCMs off target, and the BAE Mark 36 SRBOC deploys chaff and infrared decoys. A carrier’s air wing can take down drones.
Map: AmerikanetsSource: @MoloWarMonitor on XCreated with Datawrapper
Despite all these layers of defenses, the American CSGs in the theater have been extremely cautious. The CSGs themselves loiter cautiously behind an invisible barrier 150 nautical miles (278 km) from the Iranian coast, rarely venturing beyond it. The distance is telling. Allow perhaps 30 kilometers between the coast and a plausible launcher position, and the CSGs sit just beyond the reach of most Iranian ASCMs. This shows they take the threat seriously, but it allows them to continue to sortie aircraft to strike Iran.
Iran's Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles
Based on the heritage of these systems, there’s little reason to expect them to enjoy the same advantages as Iran’s most advanced medium-range missiles, and they don’t present evidence that Iran has solved the fundamental problems in ASBM design. The publicly stated range of these systems suggests they have the profile of a short-range ballistic missile (SRBM), and the accordingly lower speeds of short-range ballistic systems. There’s no evidence they can perform complex evasive maneuvers while still hitting their target, which is itself moving. The profile of their trajectory is unknown. They may have trouble dealing with the evasive maneuvers that satellite imagery shows American ships performing.
Recipe for Success
Legenda
A P-700 Grant is loaded into a Project 949A cruise missile submarine
This was the first true end-to-end aircraft carrier kill chain, with every component designed from the ground up to destroy an American CSG specifically. The Soviets were the only power on earth with the resources and motivation to deploy the world’s first (nuclear powered!) dedicated naval ISR satellite constellation. But the Granit wasn’t fielded until 1983, and the full Legenda constellation wasn’t deployed until 1988. The program faced massive technical challenges and multiple major setbacks, which is unsurprising considering its complexity and ambition. Gorbachev cancelled it the same year the last satellite in the constellation was launched, and Legenda was already heavily degraded by the time the USSR collapsed in 1991. Legenda also lacked what we’ve already identified as the silver bullet for overcoming air defenses: an extremely fast, highly accurate anti-ship ballistic missile.
East Wind
The Chinese have launched hundreds of ISR satellites into orbit, with their total in orbit increasing by a factor of six from 2018 to 2026. These include what are speculated to be dedicated constellations just for tracking American aircraft carriers. The scale of these constellations dwarfs Legenda’s, which could only provide short windows of active radar tracking. And crucially, the Chinese claim to have developed geostationary synthetic-aperture radar ISR satellites that allow uninterrupted tracking of an individual target, which is otherwise impossible given the narrow viewing window of SAR.
Combined with over-the-horizon radar, ship-based radar, and AWACS, it’s plausible to say that the Chinese are capable of knowing the precise location of an American aircraft carrier in the Pacific for lengthy, uninterrupted periods, or perhaps at all times. This is the first major problem to solve in developing a true carrier killer.
The Chinese fielded the first operational ASBM in history, the DF-21D, in 2010. Because the DF-21D has never been used in combat, and its specifications are classified, we can only speculate on how closely its claimed capabilities match reality. But its general profile is thought to be a maneuvering MRBM with a very low (estimates are 20 m) CEP, a terminal phase active radar seeker, and a 1500 km range. The DF-21D is commonly cited as having a Mach 10 “terminal phase,” though this is likely its speed at atmospheric re-entry. In order for the active radar seeker to function, it probablyslows down significantly, to around Mach 2, before impact. This is how the American Pershing II IRBM worked, engaging in a “pull up” maneuver so its active radar seeker could compare the ground below it against preloaded terrain maps.
Pershing II trajectory
The Chinese have developed a succession of more advanced anti-ship systems since the DF-21D was introduced in 2010 (be warned, the following information is highly speculative). The DF-26 is an IRBM that builds on the DF-21D with nuclear capability and increased range. The Chinese have tested it against full-scale (non-moving) mockups of Gerald R. Ford-class carriers and Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. The YJ-20, a naval-launched, hypersonic ASBM, appeared in 2025. Its biconic design should theoretically allow much higher terminal speeds and greater maneuverability than a traditional blunt cone reentry vehicle.
Also of note are Chinese hypersonic glide vehicles (HGVs), of which it has fielded at least three. An HGV moves in a flat trajectory while skipping along the atmosphere. They trade raw speed at impact for maneuverability, and various militaries claim they’re capable of extreme maneuvers that would never be possible with a traditional missile design. Their trajectory makes them immune to high altitude defense systems like the THAAD and Arrow-3. The open question is whether any of these is truly capable of active terminal guidance against a moving target. There’s no real evidence they are, and even so, an HGV doesn’t necessarily impact its target at high Mach, making it theoretically possible for it to actively seek a target, but also feasible to intercept.
While it’s reasonable to assume that HGVs will defeat high-altitude naval defenses like the SM-3, which has a minimum intercept altitude around 100 km, lower-tier interceptors may still pose a threat to them. The high terminal speed/maneuverability combination that’s made Iranian missiles so deadly may not have an ASM equivalent due to the complexities involved in designing an active seeker that can function at high Mach.
There’s little public information on the state of the art in high-Mach seekers. The Iranians themselves appear to be pushing the envelope here and claim the Qassem Bassir, arguably the most advanced Iranian MRBM, is equipped with an infrared electro-optical seeker that functions at speeds greater than Mach 5, giving the system “meter-level” accuracy. But this is supposedly a scene-matching system designed for use against static land targets, freeing it from the constraints that make ASBMs so challenging to design. And there’s no evidence yet of the Mach 5 impact claim.
But there are reasons to think this problem is solvable. Here we step from the realm of the unconfirmed to the purely speculative. The Chinese have devoted enormous resources to plasma research, and Chinese scientists have claimed major breakthroughs in passing signals through plasma. Advancements here would go a long way towards resolving the fundamental constraints in ASBM design. The first is constant, external guidance at hypersonic speeds. We’ve already covered that a military actor like China can track the real-time position of a moving naval target using its ISR network. If that network can provide constant updates to a hypersonic missile during its flight, the pressure on the missile’s onboard seeker is greatly decreased because the search space shrinks massively. The Chinese have also possibly found solutions for seeking through the plasma sheath.
It’s plausible that the Chinese possess a reliable, operational carrier killer today, and that they’re the only nation to ever have one. But this should be regarded as a holistic system, rather than just a particular missile. All the components in a highly sophisticated and staggeringly expensive chain reaching from the launcher on the ground to ISR satellites in space must work together.
So where does this leave the Iranians? First, none of this proves Iran hasn't chosen restraint. What it does establish is that restraint is a more logical choice than it may at first appear. The Iranians don’t have the resources to create an integrated space-based ISR system like the Chinese have. Their coastal radars have suffered attrition. They’ve made massive leaps in missile technology, but this is just one link in a lengthy chain. Their best bet for the moment is attriting American naval defenses with cruise missiles and drones, but this is a tall and expensive order. A single CSG has hundreds of interceptors capable of shooting down slower aerial threats. Its radars, unlike the terrestrial ones the Iranians have already destroyed, are mobile. And American naval forces are intentionally operating at the edge of Iranian cruise missile range. The Iranians could expend hundreds of cruise missiles without much to show for it. Perhaps the most realistic possibility for the Iranians to get an edge on American naval forces would be getting a little help from their friends. Chinese and Russian ISR could greatly diminish Iran’s disadvantages in targeting, but it remains to be seen if either state would be willing to take that risk.
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Discussion about this post
If this problem is solved, the drones then have to contend with the CSG's layers of air defenses. The radar coverage of a CSG is dense enough that we can presume the drone's location will be constantly known from a great distance. First, the carrier can sortie its air wing (~44 aircraft), and they can engage the drones long before they pose any danger to naval vessels. If this fails, they'll have to penetrate the CSG's electronic warfare suite and identify and track the target despite decoys and jammers. If this is possible, they then have to contend with the following, in rough order of range:
• SM-2 medium-range interceptor missiles
• ESSM short-range interceptor missiles
• RAM short-range interceptor missiles
• Mk 45 5-inch deck guns
• Mk 38 25mm machine guns
• Phalanx CIWS
• .50 caliber machine guns
Hopefully it's clear why even a large drone swarm might have trouble scoring a kill in this scenario.