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Stephen Chen

As the United States quietly pulls its most precious military assets away from the coasts of Asia, they are falling back to places like Guam in Micronesia, a US island territory far beyond the reach of most conventional missiles.
It sounds like a retreat but for the Chinese military it is actually a much trickier problem. In modern warfare, distance can become a shield and dispersion a weapon.
This is the puzzle a team of Chinese defence scientists has been solving. Their answer, published openly in a peer‑reviewed journal, offers a step‑by‑step guide on how to destroy a US carrier group from 3,000km (1,865 miles) away, precisely the distance from Shanghai to Guam.
The paper, “Research on the effectiveness of anti‑ship missile swarm operation under distributed confrontation”, comes from the College of International Studies at the National University of Defence Technology in Nanjing.
Led by associate professor Gao Tianyun, it was published in Tactical Missile Technology, one of China’s top defence journals, on May 25.
For years, the US Navy’s big ships operated relatively close to China in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and the South China Sea. That proximity made them vulnerable to China’s growing arsenal of “anti‑access/area‑denial” weapons – mid-range ballistic missiles, hypersonic gliders and swarms of cruise missiles.
So the Pentagon adopted a new concept called Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO).
Instead of clustering a carrier strike group inside one small patch of ocean, DMO scatters the ships over hundreds of kilometres. It pushes the most valuable carriers further back, while sending smaller, more expendable vessels forward to act as missile shields and floating radars.
The paper explains why this is a headache. When a carrier was only a few hundred kilometres offshore, China’s missiles could reach it quickly, from many directions.
Now, the US fleet is a dispersed and layered formation. The outermost layer is a network of Aegis destroyers stationed 600 to 800km in front of the carrier, armed with SM‑3 interceptors that can shoot down ballistic missiles in mid‑course.


Closer in, uncrewed surface vessels carrying SM‑6 and ESSM missiles created an extra “missile sponge”, Gao’s team said.
The carrier itself hides behind a dense inner ring of air-defence ships, fighters and early-warning aircraft. To kill the carrier, you first have to peel away all those layers but they are spread widely, making them hard to find, harder to hit and even harder to overwhelm all at once.
The Chinese researchers’ plan begins with a surprise. Instead of launching a mass wave of missiles from land or the air, they propose using a submarine to fire hypersonic anti-ship missiles at the forward Aegis destroyers.
A submarine can creep close to the enemy’s defensive perimeter without revealing itself, and a hypersonic weapon travels so fast and manoeuvres so erratically in the upper atmosphere that it is extremely difficult to intercept.
By striking the outer layer first, the PLA can punch a hole through the midcourse missile defence shield. Once that shield is cracked, the carrier becomes much more exposed to follow-up salvos.
The paper calls this “breaking the weak node to open a window”. No other country is known to have such a capability yet.
After the opening punch, the plan calls in an orchestrated “firepower package”.
This mixes three kinds of weapons: cheap decoy drones and low-cost cruise missiles to flood the enemy’s sensors and exhaust their interceptor stocks, subsonic stealth cruise missiles that skim the waves and slip through radar gaps, and then more hypersonic missiles aimed at the remaining high-value targets.
This combination, the paper argues, puts the US defences in a no-win dilemma. If they focus on the hypersonic threats, the stealthy low‑fliers might sneak through. If they shoot at the decoys and cheap missiles, they burn through their limited ammunition.
And if they try to defend everywhere at once, the sheer coordination of the swarm, which is timed to hit from multiple directions at the same moment, could overwhelm even the most advanced Aegis system.




One of the most unusual elements in the paper is a tactic called “leader‑follower” mode.
In a missile swarm, one missile climbs high and acts as a scout, scanning the battlefield and relaying targeting data to the other missiles flying low under the radar horizon. If the leader is shot down, another immediately takes its place.
This means the swarm does not need constant instructions from a distant command centre – it can adapt on the fly, reassign targets among itself and keep pressing the attack even in heavy electronic jamming.
Another striking feature of the Chinese scenario is that it imagines the US Navy equipped with weapons that do not yet exist such as the glide phase interceptor, designed to kill hypersonic missiles in mid-glide, and the SM-6 IB for terminal defence.
The paper’s authors call this liao di cong kuan, or expecting the enemy to be strong. By assuming the US will have its best possible equipment, the Chinese plan is built to work even against the worst-case scenario.
The paper even offers a geopolitical diagnosis. The authors argue that America’s deindustrialisation and its shrinking ability to control far‑flung bases are the real drivers of the DMO concept.
Without enough shipyards, spare parts and overseas allies willing to host big bases, the US can no longer afford to keep its carriers parked in harm’s way.
China, on the other hand, has become the world’s factory. Its shipbuilding capacity dwarfs that of the United States, and its missile production lines can churn out weapons at a pace that makes mass-swarm tactics feasible.
The National University of Defence Technology is a top Chinese military school, not a think tank. It is rare for the PLA to allow such a detailed, almost tutorial-like plan to appear in a public journal. The authors could not be reached for comment.
Last year, US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth made a startling claim: China could destroy all of America’s aircraft carriers around the world within 20 minutes. If it is true, the 3,000km distance suggested in this paper may not be the limit of the Chinese military’s playbook.


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China’s military proposes a strategy to attack out-of-reach American military assets as distance becomes a shield


China’s military proposes a strategy to attack out-of-reach American military assets as distance becomes a shield.


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PLA scientists propose a plan to destroy US carrier groups from 3,000km away

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}China’s military proposes a strategy to attack out-of-reach American military assets as distance becomes a shield

China’s military proposes a strategy to attack out-of-reach American military assets as distance becomes a shield