The US Air Force is training to take down Chinese warships, but China's military has built a 'wicked' problem for it to overcome

• China's navy has rapidly increased the size and capability of its fleet.
• That expansion worries the US military, and it has reemphasized anti-ship warfare in its training.
• That's not a new task for US pilots, but they now face a "wicked" threat from China's air defenses.

The US Air Force is working on improving its ability to sink well-defended warships, a reflection of the US military's concern about the growing size and increasing capability of China's navy.

Strikes against maritime targets are nothing new for US pilots, but China's military has spent decades developing its air defenses, installing thickets of surface-to-air missiles on land and on its warships that now pose a "wicked" problem for US forces, commanders say.

China has launched new, more advanced ships at steady clip in recent years, building what is now the world's largest navy. It has also sent those ships on more complex operations across a wider swath of the Pacific. That larger, more capable force was on display in August 2022 during exercises of unprecedented size around Taiwan following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to the island.

Were there a clash with China over Taiwan, "the first target that we're going to have to deal with is the ships, because you saw when Speaker Pelosi went to Taiwan what they did with their ships. They put them on the east side of Taiwan as a sort of blockade," Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, commander of US Pacific Air Forces, said at an Air and Space Forces Association conference in March.

"Those ships can put up an anti-access/area-denial engagement zone, which comes from their surface-to-air missiles that they can shoot from the ships. So in order for us to get past those, we've got to sink the ships," Wilsbach said.

'Wicked dangerous'

Wilsbach's comments reflect concerns about the arsenal China has built to counter US military operations, which includes "the world's densest and most integrated air-defense system" along China's east coast, according to Brendan Mulvaney, director of the China Aerospace Studies Institute, which is part of the Department of the Air Force.

That air-defense system is part of China's "counter-intervention" strategy, which is "focused on not necessarily how to defeat the United States piecemeal but how to keep the United States and our allies and partners out of the region," Mulvaney said on a podcast in September.

China's navy plans to fight under the cover of those defenses, and its Type 052D-class destroyers and Type 055-class cruisers could extend that umbrella.

"The surface-to-air-missile systems they have on those tier-one surface-action-group assets is wicked, wicked dangerous territory — significantly more dangerous than anything that's fielded in and around Ukraine," Gen. Mark Kelly said of those warships during an Air and Space Forces Conference in September.

"If you then look at the fact that they have the same systems up and down the coast, if you look at what they can do in terms of jamming across the electromagnetic spectrum, if you look at their inventory of air-to-air missiles, and the list goes on and on," added Kelly, who leads the training and organizing of Air Force units as head of Air Combat Command.

China's military hasn't fought a war since 1979, and its new naval and air forces are untested in combat, but Chinese strategists have studied other wars and learned from other militaries — that likely includes lessons from America's use of "rings of air- and missile-defense management," ranging from combat air patrols by carrier aircraft down to each ship's close-in weapon systems, said Lyle Goldstein, director of Asia engagement at Defense Priorities, a think tank.

"I think it's fair to say that they may even be on par with us," Goldstein said in an interview in May. "China generally gets high marks in air defense, and they've come a long way, and they've gotten a lot of coaching from the Russians."

A weakness in China's naval air-defense network is the inability of its current aircraft carriers, Liaoning and Shandong, to launch airborne-early-warning-and-control aircraft like those that fly from US carriers to direct friendly forces and monitor enemy ships and aircraft.

Those carriers would likely stay near Taiwan during a conflict, protected by China's air force and the "very robust air defense and missile defense" of Type 052D- and Type 055-class ships, Goldstein said.

But China's newest carrier, Fujian, has an electromagnetic catapult that will allow it to launch the KJ-500 airborne-early-warning-and-control plane, extending China's radar coverage and providing "a major jump" in capability, Goldstein said.

Old skills, new focus

US pilots have trained to sink warships since the early 1920s, well before the Air Force's founding in 1947. That mission has remained part of the service's repertoire, even during recent ground wars.

"I can tell you from experience in 2007, although my unit was in the thick of considering waging warfare in Iraq or Afghanistan at the time, we executed a Pacific theater deployment and specifically integrated with the Navy and other partners," John Baum, a former US Air Force F-16 pilot, said in an interview in March.

"And of course, maritime strike was a training skill set that we worked on then," added Baum, now a senior resident fellow at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.

The Air Force's attention to the maritime-strike mission has varied over time, however, and recent milestones in training and weapons development indicate a renewed focus on being able take down enemy ships.

A major exercise in November 2022, called Green Flag-West, departed from its traditional focus on air-to-ground missions with the US Army and saw Air Force pilots work with the Navy "on facilitating air operations in maritime surface warfare missions, air-to-surface," the service said.

In another exercise a few weeks later, Air Force Weapons School students worked with Navy units on the school's "largest-ever over-water joint counter maritime exercise." Col. Daniel Lehoski, the Weapons School commandant, said afterward that a war in the Pacific would be "a maritime fight" and that it was the school's responsibility "to produce graduates who have both the capability and confidence to build, teach, and lead in the joint, maritime environment."

A maritime focus was also evident this year in the major air-combat exercises known as Red Flag at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.

Red Flag 23-1 in February expanded its training area to include airspace over the Pacific for the first time. Red Flag 23-3, held this summer, incorporated a US Navy carrier strike group as it conducted a pre-deployment exercise. It was "the largest adaptation" of Red Flag in its 50-year history, Kelly, of Air Combat Command, said on social media.

Another Air Force official said Red Flag and other drills have made "an exponential leap" toward Pacific-focused scenarios over the past decade, adopting training that includes the "unique challenges" of "flying sorties over exposed ocean."

The Air Force is also updating its arsenal for maritime operations. It has tested a modified version of its Joint Direct Attack Munition, known as "Quicksink," to meet "an urgent need to neutralize maritime threats" and studied the use of other weapons in austere environments like those in the Pacific region.

The service is also looking for new anti-ship missiles. This spring, it announced plans to buy 268 Joint Strike Missiles over the next five years, which an official said would "bridge that gap" until it acquires more of the larger Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, which the Navy and Air Force both want and Lockheed Martin is scrambling to build.

New targeting systems have only made it easier "to find, fix, track, and target a ship," Baum said. "Now we have all-weather capabilities with new sensors on airplanes and also new weapons and fusing options available, so the targeting scenario, frankly, is much easier today than it was in the past, even 15 or 20 years ago."

While there are "different considerations" for finding targets on land and at sea, "from a technology standpoint, the Air Force has been committed to be able to hold any target at risk at any time on the planet," Baum added. "I don't think that that's any different considering the [Indo-Pacific Command] area and maritime targets."

Air Force officials know China's military will try to use the Pacific's vast distances to challenge their operations and are making adaptations, including developing more dispersed air bases and investing in more efficient tanker aircraft and in drones that could fly ahead of crewed jets.

But the recent focus on integrating with naval forces is a sign the Air Force knows jets and bombs alone may not be enough to sink better-defended warships operating over greater ranges. Wilsbach said in September that training by Pacific Air Forces has emphasized "stacking effects" to bring more weapons to bear.

"The stacking of effects starts in cyber, then there's a space, then there's an air, there may be a surface, and there may be a subsurface component, with electronic combat happening — all needing to arrive on the target coincidentally," Wilsbach said.

"In a dynamic environment where aircraft and ships and perhaps ground units from the Army, with satellites traveling through space, all have to synchronize in time and space so the effects occur at the same time on the target — so you get munitions on the target to destroy and hopefully sink the ship, as an example — that we are working on constantly," Wilsbach said.