20 September 2015
Paul Lewandowski, “Does China’s New Missile Threaten US Power in the Pacific?”Parallax World, 16 September 2015.
The DF-21D Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile was unveiled publicly at the Chinese Victory Day parade, raising questions about the US carrier fleet’s vulnerability in the Pacific. …
The Global Times… declared that, after nearly a decade of the weapon’s development, the DF-21D’s coming-out party signaled a more confident attitude from the PLA.
“The demonstration [of the DF-21D], more candid than ever before in displaying the advanced and sensitive weapons, indicated military transparency and the country’s increasing confidence in its military strength,” the Global Times reported. …
Andrew Erickson, a professor in the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute, believes the DF-21D’s appearance in the Victory Day parade is a genuine sign of China’s confidence in the weapon.
“For [the DF-21D] to appear in the recent parade, it must already be operational and Beijing must already have a certain level of confidence in its basic capabilities,” Erickson told Parallax World in an email today.
Nonetheless, Erickson maintains that, although the DF-21D is operational, its supporting technology remains unproven against U.S. carriers defended by robust countermeasures. “The missiles themselves have been tested carefully and accepted into military service as operational hardware. The reconnaissance strike complex that supports them, by contrast, remains a work in progress,” he wrote in The National Interest this month.
The DF-21D relies on a complex web of technologies to guide it toward ships at sea as they unpredictably shift locations. Satellites, drones, naval vessels, or electronic surveillance must first locate the carrier group and then continuously track its location after a missile is launched. That information must be translated, processed, and reported to the warhead, which then makes mid-flight adjustments. According to Erickson, who was consulted for this article, these technologies “have not been openly and conclusively demonstrated to meet the requirement.” While China has moved quickly in recent years to improve supporting technologies, including more than two dozen satellites, it remains to be seen if the country can integrate tracking data at the speed needed to guide a warhead onto its target.
“China’s ability to use the missile against a moving target operating in the open ocean remains unproven,” Erickson reports. The Gobi Desert test, conducted in early 2014, reveals that the DF-21D can hit stationary targets with a reliable degree of accuracy, but there is no evidence the complex targeting and guidance process has been used in realistic conditions against a moving, seaborne target.
As Erickson notes, DF-21D is still rife with uncertainty, and until the system is comprehensively and publicly proven, questions about its effectiveness cannot be dismissed.
“Despite tremendous progress in recent years concerning both the missile itself and the systems that support it, even China’s [Missile Command] itself cannot know exactly how the DF- 21D would function under actual combat conditions,” Erickson concludes. “Nobody will know for certain if this ASBM actually works as intended unless it is actually used—a prospect, it is to be hoped, that will never be realized in practice.” …
While the DF-21D represents a new technology in the Pacific, it is not a major shift in the balance of power, according to [Robert Farley, a professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy]. The DF-21D, “cannot prevent the US [Navy] from killing Chinese ships; only change the method by which the Americans do so. The use of such a weapon in anger would carry the potential for grave escalatory consequences on both sides.”
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