By Connor Keating
In April 2025, Admiral Samuel Paparo delivered his annual posture statement to the House Armed Services Committee, arguing that the United States must invest in several capabilities to remain competitive in the Indo-Pacific: command, control, computing, communications, cyber, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and targeting (C5ISRT); counter-C5ISRT (C‑C5ISRT); fires; integrated air and missile defense (IAMD); force sustainment; autonomous and AI-driven systems; and maritime domain awareness and sea control. According to Admiral Paparo, space, AI, and IAMD are critical enablers for reducing risk to U.S. forces in a conflict with China. These capabilities offer exquisite performance for roughly 95 percent of the missions the United States might face short of full-scale war, but they may not be the most cost‑effective way to reduce risk in a high‑end fight with China.
In “C-Note” #3 and in his address at the Surface Navy Association’s 38th National Symposium in January 2026, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle outlined a new “hedge strategy.”1 He explained that the Navy will build a general-purpose force—the 95 percent solution—while pursuing “tailored offsets” that augment the general-purpose force and cover the high-intensity 5 percent beyond it. Examples of hedge capabilities in his C‑Note include special operations forces to counter terrorism, ballistic-missile submarines (SSBNs) for nuclear deterrence, and the “Hellscape” concept to defeat a Taiwan invasion force.2 Taken together, Admiral Paparo’s requests and Admiral Caudle’s strategy suggest a gap: the Navy is investing heavily in the 95‑percent, general‑purpose force but underinvesting in simple, low‑cost hedge capabilities tailored to the most dangerous 5 percent of scenarios. This article focuses on one particularly dangerous contingency within that 5 percent—a high‑end conflict with China—and argues that the Navy should rapidly field a set of low‑cost, non‑kinetic hedge capabilities that improve platform survivability by stressing the entire Chinese kill chain and driving up adversary salvo requirements.
A Non-Kinetic Hedge Strategy
To be effective, hedge strategies must be relatively low‑cost in peacetime, sustainable over time, and quickly fielded when a high‑end scenario occurs. This makes kinetic and non‑kinetic drone‑ship solutions appealing for increasing magazine capacities and survivability. In practice, this means pairing manned surface combatants with unmanned platforms that can either shoot (kinetic) or sense, jam, and deceive (non‑kinetic). By adding more platforms that an adversary must detect and target—and by using some of them as decoys or stand‑in targets—the manned ships themselves become harder to find and kill. However, while potentially potent, drones’ rapid obsolescence and continuous upgrade cycle can drive up peacetime costs—especially if the Navy must sustain multiple bespoke designs—demanding a robust and affordable sustainment ecosystem.3
A more cost‑effective hedge for this high-end contingency is a set of modular non-kinetic defense systems that can be stored in peacetime and rapidly deployed in crisis. For the Navy, these could include an improved passive countermeasure system (PCMS) and radar reflectors for surface ships; inflatable decoys and radar reflectors for aircraft; and small-footprint jammer and dazzler packages that enable theater-wide deception. This article proposes three such hedge strategies: one for surface ships, one for aircraft, and one centered on small, mobile jammer and dazzler packages.
Surface Ship “Hedge Strategies”
The surface Navy could be at substantial risk from Chinese anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs) in a high-end conflict. Missiles such as the DF-26 and soon, the DF-27 can engage ships at ranges of more than 2,000 nautical miles.4,5 Some might argue that U.S. ballistic‑missile defense (BMD) is sufficient to counter these threats. It is not, for both performance and capacity reasons. U.S. BMD has struggled against Iranian threats in defense of Israel, Qatar, and in the recently launched U.S. war with Iran, allowing multiple leaks through and expending billions in interceptors.6, 7 This experience highlights not only the operational and strategic implications of interceptor shortages, but also the tactical implications of finite shipboard magazines: every missile fired in defense cannot be used in offense.8 If U.S. and allied systems struggled to stop a limited number of Iranian missiles, they are unlikely to keep pace with large-scale salvos from the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF). Even if they could, U.S. and allied BMD systems and ships are likely to exhaust their inventories faster due to the shot doctrine employed. The solution lies in exploiting inherent weaknesses in missile seekers and ballistic missile kill chains.
Missile seekers—specifically ASBM seekers—must search a significant area from a top-down angle to find a target. This forces the seeker to deal with substantial sea clutter and requires significant onboard processing.9 U.S. surface combatants help adversary seekers by presenting large radar cross sections (RCS), and existing measures to mitigate this—such as treatment with PCMS tiles—only modestly reduce RCS. Further, more seekers are incorporating multiple modes, including not only an active radar but also a passive sensor and Infrared (IR) Imaging sensors.10 Advances in radar‑ and IR‑absorbing materials—such as carbon‑nanotube (CNT) tiles and polyaniline (PANI) or vanadium dioxide (VO₂) paint coatings—could yield significantly improved PCMS, with open-source studies suggesting potential reductions in RCS on the order of more than 15 dBsm and IR signatures by roughly 20 percent.11, 12, 13 A smaller RCS and lower IR signature directly translates into a shorter detection range for an ASBM seeker and a smaller search area.14 That, in turn, forces the adversary to provide more precise targeting data or accept a higher risk of missing.15
Reducing RCS and IR signature alone, however, might not be enough to minimize the risk to surface forces. Open-source reporting indicates that China can field ASBMs equipped with both synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) and conventional radar seekers.16, 17, 18 SAR provides all-weather, fine-resolution imagery and can distinguish targets by shape, allowing a carrier to be distinguished from a destroyer. To counter this, the Navy could pair RCS‑reducing tiles with radar reflectors designed to distort a ship’s apparent shape and size in SAR imagery, making it harder to distinguish high‑value units from escorts and to achieve precise aimpoints.19 Radar reflectors have long been used as test aids for U.S. radar systems and weapons.20 By distorting the apparent size and shape of test targets to resemble adversary equipment, they help assess and improve U.S. weapon effectiveness against realistic radar signatures.21 Together, these measures would not make ships invulnerable, but they could significantly stress the entire Chinese kill chain at relatively low cost compared with hard-kill missile defenses—exactly the kind of hedge capability the Navy needs for the most dangerous 5 percent of scenarios.
Implementing these changes could be relatively straightforward because PCMS has existed as a program of record since 1998, with no significant updates. Rather than invent a new system from scratch, the Navy could reinvigorate PCMS by incorporating new CNT, PANI, and VO₂ tiles and adding several radar‑reflector configurations, delivering updates to the fleet in months rather than years. Because the new tiles would be stored and only applied in crisis or conflict, they would function as a true hedge capability—largely invisible to adversary peacetime collection yet immediately available once a conflict begins. A PANI and VO₂-based paint could also be incorporated into ship coatings moving forward, providing some degradation to seekers during routine, 95-percent, general-purpose operations. The most expensive part of the program would likely be the modeling and simulation needed to determine the correct number of tiles and their optimal placement. A similar analysis effort would be required for the radar reflectors. Even with this modeling requirement, all other parts of the implementation chain are already in place. PCMS tiles are already used in the fleet, and ship crews are trained in their employment, which removes the need for starting a new training pipeline or schoolhouse, a process that normally costs the Navy years in fielding time; the new system would be taught by existing schoolhouses and phased into the fleet’s current electronic warfare training.
Aircraft “Hedge Strategies”
Aircraft hedge strategies should mirror the surface‑ship approach in stressing the entire enemy kill chain to increase survivability: use inflatable decoys and radar reflectors at airfields to saturate adversary sensors, complicate PLARF targeting and fire distribution, and preserve high‑value air assets by stressing the entire enemy kill chain, vice relying solely on counterforce solutions to defeat attacks. Properly employed, these decoys could flood Pacific airfields with false targets, helping to preserve high-value assets such as tankers, bombers, jammers, and command-and-control (C2) aircraft.
Use of decoys as an element of deception is not new. During World War II, the United States employed a so‑called “Ghost Army” to convince German commanders that the Allied landing would occur at Calais rather than Normandy.22 More recently in Ukraine, decoys have helped protect critical air defense, artillery, and C2 assets from Russian fires.23 These examples of successful decoy use also show that decoys work best when paired with convincing signatures—radar, infrared, and electromagnetic—that can deceive modern intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems, including SAR satellites. For the Pacific, inflatable decoys and radar reflectors should be tailored to replicate a range of aircraft types, with particular emphasis on the scarce, high‑value enablers—airborne tankers, long‑range bombers, stand‑off jammers, and C2 platforms—that are operationally decisive.
Pairing inflatable decoys with radar reflectors and signal deception is essential to ensure that adversary intelligence is credibly deceived; an inflatable decoy alone will not fool sophisticated SAR satellite imagery.24 Further, decoy and radar reflector configurations should cover a wide range of aircraft platforms while focusing on the assets most important to the mission, such as tankers, bombers, jammers, and C2 aircraft. The benefit of investing in and creating these decoys now is that they can be stored at critical nodes in the theater and rapidly fielded in times of conflict. The use of decoys should be integrated into regular training to keep units proficient and ready for conflict, but also to complicate adversary intelligence collection during competition by revealing a credible deception capability, which in turn supports deterrence.
Some critics might argue that overt decoy use would “reveal” U.S. capabilities and allow the PRC to develop tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to distinguish real targets from false ones. Yet this revelation is, in many ways, a desired feature of a system designed to increase platform survivability. If Beijing believes U.S. and allied forces can rapidly flood key airfields with convincing decoys, it must either invest heavily in improved discrimination or plan to fire larger salvos at a much larger target set. Even with improved TTPs, however, finding, fixing, and tracking hundreds, if not thousands, of decoys would remain a significant challenge for any military, and would still consume time, collection assets, and munitions.
This trade-off is especially important because PLARF can fire from sanctuary on the mainland, while U.S. strikes against that sanctuary may be constrained by political decisions. Decoys and radar reflectors give the U.S. a low‑cost way to impose confusion and delay on PLARF’s targeting cycle, forcing it either to accept faster depletion of critical munitions or to slow its fires while it refines targeting. In either case, U.S. and allied forces gain time to maneuver, rearm, and reposition.25
Jammers and Dazzlers “Hedge Strategy”
Jammers and dazzlers are powerful non-kinetic devices that can act as force multipliers for the passive systems described above. In this article, “jammers” refers to small, mobile systems—such as the Space Force’s remote modular terminal (RMT)—that can degrade or deny satellite ISR.26 “Dazzlers” denotes systems that temporarily blind or degrade electro‑optical and infrared (EO/IR) sensors on adversary satellites.27 Fielded in sufficient numbers, such packages could saturate Chinese ISR coverage over key ports and airfields, forcing the PLARF and PLA Navy to guess, delay, or expend additional assets to confirm targets. In doing so, they would function as a classic hedge: relatively inexpensive in peacetime but highly effective at complicating adversary targeting in a high‑end fight.
The benefit of small, mobile jammer/dazzler packages is that they allow the United States to saturate adversary ISR and lower the risk to U.S. forces. For example, if the United States deployed roughly 100 jammer/dazzler packages across the Western Pacific—each capable of covering one‑nautical‑mile square—the U.S. could cover every major U.S. and allied airfield and port with at least one system. This could materially complicate Chinese ISR and battle-damage assessment of key nodes, or dramatically delay targeting decisions by forcing collection through human intelligence (HUMINT) rather than relying solely on satellite imagery, buying valuable reconstitution time for U.S. forces located at these key nodes. Additional units mounted on barges or ships could protect maneuvering forces at sea. In such an environment, the adversary might know the general location of U.S. forces but not their exact identity or value, a state of ambiguity that would force additional ISR sorties or demand greater acceptance of risk for fires on low‑confidence targets. Pairing ships and airfields with the non-kinetic defenses outlined above—RCS and IR reduction, reflectors, and inflatable decoys—could further enhance survivability against inbound munitions, even those equipped with sophisticated multi-mode seekers.
Ultimately, this places the adversary on the horns of a dilemma: either expend significant munitions to address every potential target, thus lowering risk to U.S. forces as exquisite munitions are depleted, or expend time and assets identifying each target, thereby allowing U.S. forces to maneuver into position to employ their own ordnance and putting Chinese forces at risk.
Why – Anecdote from a recent Halsey Alfa Wargame
In a recent iteration of the Naval War College’s Halsey Alfa China wargaming series—a campaign‑level analytic game focused on a Taiwan invasion—I served as the BLUE force commander. The game assumed a highly compressed timeline and, because of initial probabilities (rolls of chance made before game start), BLUE did not receive Japanese support. The RED commander chose a conservative “fleet in being” approach, relying on PLARF’s firepower, magazine depth, and reach to attrit BLUE while preserving his fleet for follow‑on operations.
To survive long enough to deliver munitions into the Taiwan Strait, BLUE employed layered passive deception at the land–sea interface. We used ship configurations designed to distort radar images and pulled critical air assets—tankers and bombers—out of PLARF range while strengthening air defenses at key airfields. This approach did not prevent losses, particularly among cruiser–destroyer (CRUDES) platforms, but it forced RED to expend more than a quarter of his missile inventory in a few days of fighting. Non-kinetic defenses increased the required salvo size against BLUE ships by almost an order of magnitude. The lesson was clear: had the United States possessed the layered non-kinetic capabilities outlined in this article—deception, target distortion, and ISR degradation—it could have stressed the entire Chinese kill chain, forced the adversary to expend munitions far faster, and preserved enough combat power to sustain offensive operations over a longer period of time.
A simplified example illustrates the effect. Suppose an adversary missile has a 90‑percent chance of detecting and killing a ship that lacks passive defenses. Now assume that layered passive measures—decoys, jammers, dazzlers, RCS and IR reduction, and radar reflectors—each reduce that effectiveness by about 80 percent at different points in the kill chain.28, 29 Unclassified sources suggest such reductions are realistic estimates for individual links, and when combined, they dramatically increase the ship’s probability of survival and force the adversary to fire many more missiles to achieve the same expected damage. In practical terms, if it originally took 12 missiles to have high confidence of at least one hit, after layered passive measures, it might take four times as many to achieve the same effect. Adding soft‑kill electronic attack increases this requirement even further, without the radiating signatures that hard‑kill defenses often create. In other words, layered non‑kinetic defenses substantially increase the required salvo size for the attacker.
Another way to apply this logic is to tailor passive defenses to areas threatened by specific PLARF systems, such as installations and facilities within the DF-26’s effective range. The United States could deliberately design a posture that drives up Chinese expenditure of these critical munitions. This creates a dilemma: either fire at low-confidence targets and accept faster magazine depletion, or spend more time and assets refining targeting. Either choice creates seams the United States can exploit. If China shoots early and often, U.S. forces can move in sooner as inventories fall. If China delays, BLUE can use time and maneuver to bring forces into the weapons engagement zone on favorable terms.
Conclusion
As Admiral Caudle has argued, the Navy needs hedge strategies that keep the force relevant in high‑end conflict without breaking the bank in peacetime—ways to augment the general purpose force and cover the most dangerous scenarios, which specifically includes a potential war with China. Layered non-kinetic defenses—employed as a combined system—offer one such hedge. For surface forces, the Navy should update the PCMS program with a new tile‑and‑paint system and pair it with radar reflectors that distort imaging seekers. For air forces, it should field decoys and radar reflectors, as seen in Ukraine, to cast doubt on the precise location of U.S. air assets. Finally, the Navy and joint force should combine small, mobile jammers and dazzlers to saturate adversary ISR and degrade battle damage assessment, preserving operational surprise.
None of these ideas are technologically exotic. They are relatively low-cost, can be stored in peacetime, and can be rapidly fielded in a crisis. Together, layered non-kinetic defenses would not make U.S. forces invulnerable inside the weapons engagement zone, but they would impose steep costs on Chinese targeting and munitions inventories while materially improving platform and asset survivability—precisely the kind of hedge the Navy needs for the most demanding, high-end scenarios.
Lieutenant Connor Keating commissioned from the Virginia Tech NROTC and served aboard a forward-deployed destroyer in Yokosuka, Japan. On shore duty, he was a protocol action officer to the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is an integrated air-and-missile defense warfare tactics instructor and participated in the Naval War College’s Halsey Alfa Advanced Research Project as a resident student.
Endnotes
1. Caudle, Daryl L. “C-NOte #3: World Class Fleet.” Message to the Fleet from the Chief of Naval Operations, United States Navy, December 1, 2025. https://www.mynavyhr.navy.mil/Portals/55/Messages/NAVADMIN/NAV2025/NAV25241.pdf.
2. Caudle, Daryl L. “C-NOte #3: World Class Fleet.” Message to the Fleet from the Chief of Naval Operations, United States Navy, December 1, 2025. https://www.mynavyhr.navy.mil/Portals/55/Messages/NAVADMIN/NAV2025/NAV25241.pdf.
3. “The Impact of Drones on the Battlefield: Lessons of the Russia-Ukraine War from a French Perspective.” 2025. Hudson Institute. October 21, 2025. https://www.hudson.org/missile-defense/impact-drones-battlefield-lessons-russian-ukraine-war-french-perspective-tsiporah-fried.
4. “DF-26.” n.d. Missile Threat. https://missilethreat.csis.org/missile/dong-feng-26-df-26/.
5. Lariosa, Aaron-Matthew. 2025. “Chinese Forces Fielding Intercontinental Anti-Ship Ballistic Missiles Capable of Reaching U.S. West Coast, Pentagon Says – USNI News.” USNI News. December 26, 2025. https://news.usni.org/2025/12/26/chinese-forces-fielding-intercontinental-anti-ship-ballistic-missiles-capable-of-reaching-u-s-west-coast-pentagon-says.
6. News, PBS. 2025. “Pentagon Acknowledges Iran’s Attack on Qatar Air Base Hit Dome Used for U.S. Communications.” PBS News. July 11, 2025. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/pentagon-acknowledges-irans-attack-on-qatar-air-base-hit-dome-used-for-u-s-communications.
7. Cancian, Mark F, and Chris H Park. 2026. “Iran War Cost Estimate Update: $11.3 Billion at Day 6, $16.5 Billion at Day 12.” Csis.org. 2026. https://www.csis.org/analysis/iran-war-cost-estimate-update-113-billion-day-6-165-billion-day-12.
8. Rumbaugh, Wes. 2025. “The Depleting Missile Defense Interceptor Inventory.” Csis.org. 2025. https://www.csis.org/analysis/depleting-missile-defense-interceptor-inventory.
9. “Active Radar Homing.” Grokipedia. xAI. Last fact-checked January 14,2026. https://grokipedia.com/page/Active_radar_homing.
10.Bronk, Justin. 2020. Review of Russian and Chinese Combat Air Trends: Current Capabilities and Future Threat Outlook. RUSI. RUSI. October 30, 2020. https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/whitehall-reports/russian-and-chinese-combat-air-trends-current-capabilities-and-future-threat-outlook#:~:text=China%20has%20developed%20J%2D11,20B%20having%20begun%20in%202020.
11. Kim, Seong-Hwang, Seul-Yi Lee, Yali Zhang, Soo-Jin Park, and Junwei Gu. 2023. “Carbon-Based Radar Absorbing Materials toward Stealth Technologies.” Advanced Science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany), September, e2303104. https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202303104.
12. Zhang, Deqing, Xiuying Yang, Junye Cheng, Mingming Lu, and Maosheng Cao. 2013. “Facile Preparation, Characterization, and Highly Effective Microwave Absorption Performance of CNTs/Fe 3 O 4 /PANI Nanocomposites.” Journal of Nanomaterials 2013 (5): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/591893.
13. Jiang, Changhao, Liangliang He, Qi Xuan, et al. “Phase-Change VO₂-Based Thermochromic Smart Windows.” Light: Science & Applications 13 (2024): 255. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-024-01560-9.
14. To illustrate with an example: Consider the basic radar range equation, which describes the received power (Pr) at the seeker:
For the seeker to detect the target, Pr must exceed a minimum detectable signal threshold (accounting for noise and other factors). If all other parameters are fixed, Pr is directly proportional to σ and inversely proportional to R⁴.Suppose a conventional aircraft has an RCS of 1 m², detectable by a given seeker at a range of 10 km. If stealth technology reduces the RCS to 0.0001 m² (a factor of 10,000 reduction, common in advanced designs), the maximum detection range drops significantly. Since range R is proportional to the fourth root of σ (R ∝ σ^{1/4}), reducing σ by 10,000 (10^4) cuts R by a factor of 10 (since (10^4)^{1/4} = 10). Thus, the new detection range might be only 1 km, allowing the aircraft to approach much closer before being detected.
15. Grant, Rebecca. The Radar Game: Understanding Stealth and Aircraft Survivability. Arlington, VA: Mitchell Institute for Airpower Studies, 2010. https://secure.afa.org/Mitchell/reports/MS_RadarGame_0910.pdf.
16. Erickson, Andrew S. Chinese Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile (ASBM) Development: Drivers, Trajectories, and Strategic Implications. Washington, DC: Jamestown Foundation, 2013.
17. Kreisher, Otto. “China’s Carrier Killer: Threat and Theatrics.” Air & Space Forces Magazine, December 1, 2013. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/1213china.
18. “CM-401 Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile.” GlobalSecurity.org. Accessed January 16, 2026. https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/cm-401.htm.
19. Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division. Electronic Warfare and Radar Systems Engineering Handbook. 4th ed. Point Mugu, CA: Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, 2013. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA617071.pdf.
20. Smith, Mark , Lokesh Saggam, and Shashi Saggam. n.d. Review of Trihedral Reflectors for Radar Applications. Millimeter Wave Product Inc. Mi-Wave© (Millimeter Wave Products Inc.). Accessed March 15, 2026. https://www.miwv.com/trihedral-reflectors-for-radar-applications/.
21. Leone, Dario. 2021. “How Luneburg Lens Radar Reflectors Are Used to Make Stealth Aircraft Visible on Radar Screens.” The Aviation Geek Club. June 11, 2021. https://theaviationgeekclub.com/these-devices-make-stealth-aircraft-visible-on-radar-screens/.
22. Murphy, Brian John. 2018. “Patton’s Ghost Army – D-Day Deception – America in WWII Mag.” Americainwwii.com. 2018. http://www.americainwwii.com/articles/pattons-ghost-army/.
23. Bonsegna, Nicola. 2024. “The Strategic Role of Decoys in the Conflict in Ukraine.” TDHJ.org. October 31, 2024. https://tdhj.org/blog/post/decoys-conflict-ukraine/.
24. SAR. “Detecting Russian Inflatable Decoys with SAR.” Synthetic Aperture Radar, July 31, 2017. https://syntheticapertureradar.com/detecting-russian-inflatable-decoys-with-sar.
25. Bonsegna, Nicola. 2024. “The Strategic Role of Decoys in the Conflict in Ukraine.” TDHJ.org. October 31, 2024. https://tdhj.org/blog/post/decoys-conflict-ukraine/.
26. US Space Force. “US Space Force to Use Three Weapons To Jam Chinese Satellites Via Remote Control.” Bloomberg, November 4, 2025. https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-11-04/us-space-force-to-use-three-weapons-to-jam-chinese-satellites-via-remote-control.
27. Tingley, Brett. 2024. “Space Force Tests Small Satellite Jammer to Protect against ‘Space-Enabled’ Attacks.” Space.com. April 24, 2024. https://www.space.com/space-force-ground-based-jammer-electronic-warfare.
28. Smith, Ryan M. “Using Kill-Chain Analysis to Develop Surface Ship CONOPs to Defend Against Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles.” Master’s thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, 2010. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA524758.pdf.
29. Cadirci, Semih. “RF Stealth (Or Low Observable) and Counter Low Observable Technology.” Master’s thesis, Naval Postgraduate School, 2009. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA496936.pdf.
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