China’s answer to the US Navy may not be a single “carrier-killer” missile, but a coordinated swarm designed to overwhelm defenses through sheer scale, speed and complexity.
This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that a research team led by Associate Professor Gao Tianyun from China’s National University of Defense Technology published a peer-reviewed paper detailing a step-by-step strategy to destroy dispersed US carrier groups from 3,000 kilometers away, targeting assets as far as Guam.
Published in the defense journal Tactical Missile Technology, the study addresses the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) concept, which scatters naval formations to mitigate regional vulnerability.
To counter this layered defense, the Chinese researchers propose an initial surprise strike using submarines to launch hypersonic anti-ship missiles at forward-deployed US Aegis destroyers. This tactic aims to crack the outer mid-course missile shield, exposing the aircraft carrier to subsequent salvos.
The plan then employs an orchestrated, multi-directional “firepower package” that combines cheap decoy drones, low-cost cruise missiles, and wave-skimming subsonic stealth missiles to deplete defense ammunition and saturate radar tracking.
Notably, the swarm uses a “leader-follower” mode in which a designated scout missile relays data to low-flying missiles, dynamically adjusting if the leader is intercepted. The authors argue that these mass-swarm tactics capitalize on China’s massive shipbuilding and missile manufacturing capacities relative to US deindustrialization.
Yet the effectiveness of any missile swarm depends on more than the number of missiles launched. To strike a moving carrier 3,000 kilometers away, China must first maintain an unbroken kill chain capable of finding, tracking and targeting the fleet despite US efforts to disrupt it.
In a May 2026 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) brief, Seth Jones notes that traditional US surface warships, such as carriers and destroyers, are highly exposed to precision strikes from the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF), despite their complex onboard defensive systems. Jones adds that their immense physical profiles make them vulnerable to large salvos of cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic missiles.
Complex kill chains – the procedures and assets that enable finding, fixing, tracking and targeting – may be the critical vulnerability in China’s missile-swarm concept.
As Jonathan Caverley notes in a 2025 Texas National Security Review (TNSR) article, long-range strikes against moving carrier groups require an uninterrupted chain of sensors, communications networks and weapons guidance systems. That architecture, he says, depends heavily on vulnerable space-based surveillance assets, creating multiple opportunities for disruption.
Veerle Nouwens and her co-authors argue in a January 2024 report for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) that while China can readily threaten fixed targets, striking moving carrier groups remains far more demanding. They note that maintaining continuous over-the-horizon awareness requires a sophisticated sensor network that may be vulnerable to US cyber, electronic warfare and counter-space operations.
Even if China strengthens its targeting architecture, it will still need to overcome increasingly distributed and unmanned US defensive networks designed specifically to absorb saturation attacks.
Beyond electronic and cyberwarfare, Jordan Spector, in a March 2026 Proceedings article, notes that the US Navy can counter saturation threats by implementing a layered, unmanned architecture that maximizes defensive depth.
He describes a layered defense consisting of an outer layer of a network of medium unmanned surface vessels (MUSVs) that expands early-warning detection and electronic jamming capabilities.
After that, Spector says a magazine on large unmanned surface vessels (LUSVs) serves as a remote arsenal, boosting missile capacity with multiple types of interceptors. Behind that, cruisers and destroyers coordinate terminal defense from the inner layer. He notes that such an integrated framework offloads risk to affordable, autonomous systems, preserving carrier strike group survivability.
China is not standing still, however. To make missile swarms more resilient, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is exploring kill-web architectures and autonomous systems that could continue operating even after portions of its targeting network are degraded or destroyed.
In a 2025 article in the peer-reviewed Air & Space Defense journal, Wang Chaochen and other writers mention that while conventional kill chains suffer from sequential dependencies—making them highly vulnerable to being severed if a single node fails—a kill web dynamically integrates dispersed combat nodes across land, sea, air, space, and cyber domains.
Wang and others say that by leveraging an open service architecture, edge computing, and local autonomous decision-making, the kill web ensures information is shared in real time. Consequently, they note that even if specific links suffer electronic interference or physical damage, the system dynamically reorganizes multi-path adaptive links to maintain uninterrupted operational lethality.
Beyond kill webs, China can employ increasingly autonomous AI to lessen dependence on kill networks. As Kateryna Bondar and Matt Mande mention in a report this month for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), traditional unmanned systems rely on a constant communication link—the “tether”—to a human operator for flight, navigation, and targeting.
Bondar and Mande note that while electronic warfare can sever this link, rendering the platforms useless, genuine AI-enabled edge autonomy mitigates this vulnerability by allowing a system to operate independently.
They point out that instead of requiring constant human intervention, an operator can provide a strategic goal, and the autonomous system then calculates its own route, navigates entirely without GPS, and independently identifies and engages targets, removing the single point of failure caused by external signal disruption.
The decisive question for China’s missile-swarm strategy may therefore be less about missile range or salvo size than whether it can preserve long-range targeting effectiveness after parts of its battle network have been disrupted.
In a future Pacific conflict, the decisive contest may not be over whose missiles fly farther or arrive in greater numbers, but whose battle network keeps fighting after communications, sensors and command links begin to fail.
Iran must learn from this.