For decades, the United States has taken China’s ballistic missile capability for granted, assessing it as a low-capability force with limited regional impact and virtually no strategic value. But on October 1, during a massive military parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Beijing put the U.S., and the world, on notice that this assessment was no longer valid. 

In one fell swoop, China may have nullified America’s strategic nuclear deterrent, the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and U.S. missile defense capability. Through its impressive display of new weapons systems, China has underscored the reality that while the United States has spent the last two decades squandering trillions of dollars fighting insurgents in the Middle East, Beijing was singularly focused on overcoming American military superiority in the Pacific. If the capabilities of these new weapons are taken at face value, China will have succeeded on this front.

In the West, it is called RMA, short for “Revolution in Military Affairs.” The term was first coined by Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov in the early 1980s. Ogarkov, who was at the time serving as the chief of the Soviet general staff, spoke of “developments in nonnuclear means of destruction [which] promise to make it possible to sharply increase (by at least an order of magnitude) the destructive potential of conventional weapons, bringing them closer, so to speak, to weapons of mass destruction in terms of effectiveness.”

Ogarkov’s work caught the attention of Andrew Marshall, who headed the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment. Marshall took Ogarkov’s premise and put it into action, integrating new technology with innovative operational concepts that positioned the U.S. military to be able to prevail over a numerically superior Soviet army in a ground war in Europe. The capabilities of Marshall’s RMA were potently displayed during the Gulf War in 1991, when the U.S. led a coalition that handily defeated Saddam Hussein.

One of the nations keenly observing the impact of the American RMA in the Persian Gulf was China. Chinese military theorists studied how Marshall adapted Ogarkov’s theories into an American version of RMA, and responded with a Chinese adaptation, developing weapons specifically intended to overcome American superiority in critical areas.

These weapons became known as “shashoujian,” or “the Assassin’s Mace,” derived from the traditional Chinese way of describing a weapon of surprising power. “A shashoujian,” a contemporary Chinese military journal notes, “is a weapon that has an enormous terrifying effect on the enemy and that can produce an enormous destructive assault.” More importantly, the modern Chinese concept of shashoujian envisions not a single weapon, but rather a system of weapons that combine to produce the desired effect.

Defeating the United States in a ground war has never been an objective of the Chinese military—the Korean War was an historical anomaly. China’s focus instead has been to develop shashoujian weapons to safeguard its national security and territorial integrity. This couldn’t be accomplished simply by mimicking the American RMA example; they needed to create a uniquely Chinese military superiority that combined Western technology with Eastern wisdom. “This,” the Chinese believe, “is our trump card for winning a 21st century war.”

For China, the three principle points of potential military friction with the U.S. are Taiwan, South Korea-Japan, and the South China Sea. Apart from South Korea and Japan, where the U.S. has significant ground and air forces already forward deployed, the main threat to China is maritime power projected by American aircraft carrier battlegroups and amphibious assault ships. The Chinese response was to develop a range of anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities designed to target American naval forces before they arrived in any potential contested waters.

Traditionally, the U.S. Navy has relied on a combination of surface warships armed with sophisticated air defense systems, submarines, and the aircraft carrier’s considerable contingent of combat aircraft to defend against hostile threats in time of war. China’s response came in the form of the DF-21D medium-range missile, dubbed the “carrier killer.” With a range of between 1,450 and 1,550 kilometers, the DF-21D employs a maneuverable warhead that can deliver a conventional high-explosive warhead with a circular error of probability (CEP) of 10 meters—more than enough to strike a carrier-sized target…..More Here