Harry Kazianis
Key Points and Summary – China’s biggest edge over U.S. aircraft carriers isn’t its own flight decks; it’s salvo mass.
-The PLA Rocket Force can launch dense waves of ballistic, cruise, and hypersonic missiles—DF-21D, DF-26, DF-17 among them—guided by a maturing kill chain of satellites, radars, aircraft, and drones.
-Geography multiplies the effect: close to home, China can overwhelm limited shipboard magazines and push carrier groups back.
-This missile “bubble” grants Chinese carriers a sheltered lane to matter earlier in a fight. U.S. defenses help but don’t erase the arithmetic—so the answer is range, deception, distribution, and undersea pressure that breaks the kill chain and buys carriers space to operate.
China’s Real Aircraft Carrier Edge: A Sea Of Missiles
If you’re comparing flight decks, catapults, and the choreography of launch-and-recovery cycles, the United States still wears the crown. But suppose you compare what happens before a carrier ever gets within its preferred striking range. In that case, China enjoys a blunt, asymmetric edge the U.S. Navy cannot wish away: massive salvos of land-based ballistic, cruise, and now hypersonic missiles that can flood the air around a carrier strike group, force it to maneuver at the enemy’s tempo, and—above all—push it back. In the Indo-Pacific, where geography favors the defender and airfields ring the battlespace, that sheer volume of fire can matter more than the marquee ship you send to sea.
This isn’t a funeral dirge for American carriers. It’s an honest accounting of salvo math, geography, and time—and how those three variables combine to give the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) the initiative in a war that starts near its shores. The punch line is simple: the advantage isn’t China’s carriers. It’s the missile ecosystem that would shape the sea and sky before their carriers join the fight.
The Advantage Isn’t The Carrier—It’s The Missiles
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