Well, at least a little anyway.
For the longest time multiple people have raised the alarm about the Chinese Navy developing more ships, more capabilities and especially more missiles. The worry has been the US Navy would get “out-sticked,” as in the range of Chinese missiles would be so great they could hit US ships before those ships could even fire back.
This was true over the past decades because the Navy primarily used the Harpoon anti-ship missile, which has an effective range of 75 miles, and has been in service since 1977. Meanwhile, the Chinese Navy rolled out a nearly matching missile, the C-705, in 2006, and kept rolling out missiles, from the YJ-12 and YJ-18 to now the YJ-21, which claims to be a hypersonic, sea-borne anti-ship missile. During this time, the US sat on its hands and did almost nothing to increase the range of our missiles.
This was made worse by the fact we already HAD a long range missile. The Tomahawk, normally considered a land-strike missile, had a maritime strike version known as the TASM as early as 1990, yet they were all scrapped after the first Gulf War. The TASM had an effective range of around 900 miles, making it far superior to the Harpoon in all things but speed.
Range makes a big difference…if I can shoot first and force an enemy to maneuver to avoid getting hit, I get to call the shots and drive any engagement. While Chinese missiles aren’t known for their quality (just ask the Indonesians, who watched two failed C705 launches from his vessels in 2016), having multiple missiles hurtling towards, even if they aren’t the greatest quality, still puts you in a reactive mode.
Thankfully, this story has a better ending than most. In 2020 the Navy asked Raytheon to re-develop the maritime strike tomahawk. Not surprisingly, since this had been done once before, it rolled out quickly in 2021, and made front page news today.
This proves a much bigger point though: decline is a choice. We never had to give up long range missiles. Even if we would have kept them in low production, we could have easily updated the design over the 90s and 2000s to keep a competitive edge over any adversary. Instead, we pissed away our advantage for years and are now playing catch up. We chose to decline, but thankfully we’re slowly choosing to do otherwise.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.