US Missiles Fall Short In Long-Range Game With China

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Further, ballistic missiles may be much more effective against hardened targets, such as aircraft shelters and missile silos, as they travel at hypersonic speeds during their terminal phase, giving them tremendous kinetic energy that allows them to damage such targets or cause them to collapse.

Timothy Walton and Tom Shugart III mention in a January 2025 Hudson Institute report that since the early 2010s, China has doubled the number of its hardened aircraft shelters (HAS), of which it now has 3,000. Walton and Shugart say that China maintains 134 airbases within 1,800 kilometers of the Taiwan Strait, with 650 HAS and 2,000 non-hardened individual aircraft shelters (IAS).

Meanwhile, Newsweek reported in December 2024 that China has 368 known missile silos, with 30 silos in its central region, 18 in the south, 90 in the north and 230 in the west.

According to Ryan Snyder in a December 2024 article in the peer-reviewed Science & Global Security journal, those silos are estimated to be hardened to 1,500 pounds per square inch (psi), with older ones rated at 450 psi. Snyder says Chinese missile silos feature sophisticated shock isolation systems designed to attenuate horizontal missile movement within.

As for the advantages of ASBMs over other types of anti-ship missiles, Andrew Erickson mentions in the 2013 book“Chinese Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile (ASBM) Development: Drivers, Trajectories, and Strategic Implications” that such weapons can bypass traditional carrier defenses by striking from above at high speeds, effectively removing the carrier's air group-the primary line of defense-from the defensive equation.

Erickson says this capability creates a severe targeting and interception challenge, as defending against missiles is inherently more difficult than defending against submarines or aircraft. He also notes that ASBMs exploit adversary naval vulnerabilities without requiring a direct match to those capabilities, offering potentially devastating, precise and hard-to-defend“multi-axis” strikes.

Tying up these developments into a larger operational picture, Thomas Mahnken and others mention in a 2019 Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA) report that the US maritime pressure strategy aims to dissuade Chinese leaders from aggression in the Pacific.

The writers note the strategy entails establishing highly-survivable precision-strike networks in the First Island Chain spanning Japan's southern island of Okinawa, Taiwan and the Philippines, backed by naval, air, electronic warfare and other capabilities.

Mahnken and others say that these decentralized networks would function as an“inside force” optimized to attack People's Liberation Army (PLA) forces from inside its anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) bubble, while supported by“outside forces” able to join the fight from further afield.

They note that land-based anti-ship, anti-air and electronic warfare units along the First Island Chain would serve as the backbone of the inside-out operational concept-both anchoring frontline defense and freeing up US ships and aircraft for higher-priority missions such as striking surveillance nodes, reinforcing gaps and exploiting opportunities created by ground-based strikes.

However, Grant Georgulis argues in a 2022 Journal of Indo-Pacific Affairs article that the First Island Chain is neither a survivable nor a viable operating area due to Chinese military capabilities such as long-range bombers, cruise missiles and theater ballistic missiles.

Underscoring that threat, the US DOD 2024 China Military Power Report (CMPR) shows that the First and Second Island Chain spanning the Bonin Islands, Mariana Islands, Caroline Islands and Western New Guinea are entirely within the range of the PLA's long-range strike capabilities.