‘Guam Express’ and ‘Carrier Killers’: China’s Asymmetric Missile Threat to the United States in the Pacific

This chapter builds on the military-technological theme and discusses the strategic implications of a new generation of stealthier and increasingly survivable Chinese antiship missiles (ASMs) for U.S. naval surface fleets and carrier strike groups operating in the Western Pacific—especially the ability of these weapons to evade U.S. missile defenses. This chapter argues that the proliferation of China’s maturing precision-strike missile regime could presage a new military-technological paradigm on the future networked battlefield in the Asia-Pacific. It finds that the development and diffusion of these asymmetric precision-strike weapons increase the risks of miscalculation, deterrence failure, military escalation, inadvertent war, and an intractable security dilemma in this highly contested domain—or missile ‘salvo competition’.