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.
