China’s YJ-18 missile reimagined to strike US naval logistics

China’s unveiling of the YJ-18C cruise missile underscores a shift in its military thinking toward cheap, stealthy weapons designed to erode US naval endurance by attacking logistics rather than seeking decisive fleet engagements.

This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that China’s military is considering repurposing its newly unveiled YJ-18C land-attack cruise missile into a cost-effective anti-ship weapon aimed at exploiting US naval logistics vulnerabilities in a high-intensity conflict, according to an analysis by a Chinese military journal.

The subsonic YJ-18C is designed to trade speed for stealth, range and ease of mass production, making it suitable for attrition warfare rather than high-end fleet engagements.

The magazine Shipborne Weapons Defence Review, owned by China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC), argued that the missile could function as a “transport ship killer,” targeting lightly defended US supply and transport vessels rather than heavily protected carrier strike groups.

With a cruising speed of about Mach 0.8, an estimated range exceeding 1,000 kilometers, and a radar cross-section reportedly as low as 0.005 square meters, the YJ-18C is described as comparable in concept to the US Navy’s AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missile (LRASM)—though unlike the air-launched LRASM, it is designed for flexible launch from submarines, surface ships, and potentially civilian platforms.

Such capabilities, it argued, could have a strategic impact given concerns raised by US analysts over ageing sealift fleets, declining shipbuilding capacity and the vulnerability of maritime logistics in a prolonged US-China conflict.

That logic reflects a broader reassessment of missile warfare, as Michael Bohnert notes in an October 2025 Military Times article that the weapons, flying at low altitude and often using terrain or sea-skimming profiles, are difficult for air defenses to detect and intercept, exploiting radar blind spots and reaction-time limits.

According to Bohnert, their guidance systems allow flexible routing, retargeting, and high accuracy against fixed and mobile targets. He adds that compared with costlier systems (i.e., hypersonic missiles such as the YJ-21), cruise missiles can be produced and employed in large numbers, enabling saturation attacks that overwhelm defenses. Bohnert also points out that their adaptability across air, sea, and land launch platforms makes them a persistent and versatile battlefield threat.

Looking into the cost benefits of subsonic cruise missiles over other types, David Axe mentions in an October 2025 article for The Strategist that cheap cruise missiles could be decisive in a Pacific war because they solve the core problem of scale in high-intensity conflict: sustaining firepower over time.

Axe argues that inexpensive, mass-producible cruise missiles are concealable, mobile, and accurate enough to inflict meaningful damage, allowing forces to overwhelm fleets, air bases, supply lines, and industry through sheer volume rather than exquisite precision.

In a Taiwan scenario, Axe stresses that geography favors saturation attacks, where launching thousands of low-cost missiles and drones can cripple an invasion or intervention force faster than expensive “boutique” weapons can be replaced, emphasizing that quantity, not sophistication, becomes the decisive advantage.

For China, translating that logic into battlefield advantage depends not only on missile numbers but also on how unpredictably and widely they can be delivered.

As for the tactical and operational implications of launching the YJ-18C from concealed containerized launchers, Asia Times noted in December 2025 that containerized missile launchers concealed on merchant ships such as the Zhongda 79 offer powerful tactical and operational advantages by maximizing surprise, ambiguity, and saturation.

Zhongda 79 is an experimental Chinese container ship configured as a modular “arsenal ship,” integrating concealed containerized vertical launch missile cells reportedly holding up to 60 missiles.

Tactically, missiles hidden among standard cargo can be launched with minimal warning from unexpected locations, complicating enemy detection, targeting, and defensive timelines. This capability enables sudden first-salvo or multi-axis attacks that strain air and missile defenses disproportionate to the number of launch cells deployed.

Operationally, weaponized merchant ships support distributed lethality by spreading strike capacity across numerous civilian hulls, increasing survivability and forcing adversaries into difficult escalation decisions over whether to treat commercial traffic as hostile.

This focus on disrupting sustainment and decision-making rather than destroying frontline combatants aligns with China’s broader doctrine of systems-destruction warfare.

However, their effectiveness hinges on the quality of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and is best suited for opening-phase operations rather than sustained exchanges.

Putting that capability into a larger strategic picture, Mark Cozad and other writers mention in a March 2023 RAND report that China’s approach to systems destruction warfare views modern conflict as a struggle between interconnected operational systems rather than individual platforms or forces.

Cozad and others note that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) seeks to paralyze an adversary by disrupting critical nodes—command and control, ISR, logistics, information networks, and decision-making—so the enemy system collapses even if many units remain intact.

They emphasize that China aims for asymmetric, system-wide effects that undermine the opponent’s ability to fight as an integrated whole, particularly against the US military in a Taiwan contingency.

The YJ-18C fits squarely into China’s systems-destruction warfare by targeting the connective tissue that allows an adversary’s force to function rather than its most heavily defended platforms.

Instead of focusing on carrier kills, the YJ-18C is optimized to disrupt logistics ships, sealift, replenishment nodes, and rear-area maritime traffic—key enablers of US operational endurance. Its stealthy, subsonic profile, long range, and mass-producibility support saturation attacks that strain sensors, command-and-control, and defensive missile inventories simultaneously.

By degrading sustainment, forcing fleet dispersal, and increasing uncertainty over launch vectors (including containerized platforms), the YJ-18C helps collapse the US naval system’s ability to operate coherently, achieving disproportionate effects without decisive battles.

However, China may be facing production problems when it comes to manufacturing enough missiles for a conflict with the US over Taiwan.

A January 2026 Heritage Foundation report argues that while China can produce cruise missiles at scale, mass production faces significant structural challenges. It highlights vulnerabilities from centralized, non-redundant production and integration facilities, especially those handling guidance systems, warhead assembly, and energetic materials, which are difficult to disperse or rapidly reconstitute if disrupted.

The report also points out that China’s dependence on specialized civilian infrastructure, digital logistics networks, and imported or tightly concentrated inputs—such as advanced semiconductors—creates exploitable bottlenecks.

It also notes that surge production relies heavily on effective military-civil fusion and bureaucratic coordination, which could degrade under sustained attack or disruption, limiting long-term output.

These constraints suggest that while China’s cruise-missile-centric strategy favors attrition and scale, it may prove vulnerable if the conflict becomes a prolonged industrial contest rather than a short, systems-shock campaign.

Taken together, the YJ-18C illustrates how China is betting on cheap, stealthy and flexible cruise missiles to wage systems-destruction warfare against US logistics and endurance, even as industrial bottlenecks may constrain how far that strategy can scale in a prolonged conflict.