News Report: China to Deploy Lethal Fleet of 'Carrier Killer' Ballistic Missile Destroyers

Type 052D Luyang III class Destroyer

Beijing recently produced its eleventh "carrier killer" destroyer and is set to deploy a fleet of the fearsome battleships to the South China Sea in an attempt to ward off American naval forces.

Last week, the eleventh Type 052 Luyang III-class elite guided-missile destroyer joined the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) fleet marking an aggressive increase in the production of the lethal vessels. The battleship is often compared to Japan's violent Aegis destroyer.

Only one week prior, the ninth and tenth 052D destroyer took to the waters after being produced in China’s Jiangnan Shipyard with Beijing planning to construct at least five more battleships in the coming weeks amid tensions in the South China Sea.

The destroyers are set to be deployed to the South China Sea with some of the battleships set to flank the Liaoning, China’s only aircraft carrier that itself has sparked the attention of Western defense analysts due to its growing combat capabilities and potential to house a fleet of 20 elite fighter jets.

Think Tank: Filling the gap - Anti-ship missiles and the Royal Australian Navy

Christopher Cowan

On 4 February, US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced that the US Navy had developed a new anti-ship missile (ASM)—the Standard Missile 6 (SM-6). But that ‘new’ missile isn’t as new as it might seem. The SM-6 has been in limited service with the US Navy as its most capable long range anti-air and anti-missile weapons system since 2013. The SM-6 is estimated to have a range of over 200 nautical miles (370km) and flies at Mach 3.5, giving it the ability to hit an adversary at a long range with little to no warning from defensive radars.

That news comes at a welcome time for many around the world lamenting the US Navy’s lack of a long-range ASM capability. Since retiring the anti-ship variant of the venerable AGM-65 Tomahawk in 1994, the US Navy has been in want of a long range supersonic ASM and has relied upon the slower and shorter ranged RGM-84 Harpoon and SM-2 (the SM-6’s predecessor which had a limited anti-ship capability) missiles to satisfy its surface-to-surface requirements. However, the US Navy isn’t the only state with this capability gap. Years of disinterest in surface warfare, caused by a lack of credible adversaries, have left many western navies (including Australia) far behind the likes of China and Russia in the development of those types of missiles.