China’s DF-26B Missile: Now the biggest naval force in the world, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is limited in its ability to operate outside of China’s territorial waters. With two aircraft carriers in operation now and a third launched last year, it still lags behind the eleven nuclear-powered carriers of the United States Navy.
Future hostilities between China and the United States will probably centre on Taiwan, and significant American participation in this area would see the deployment of American warships to the South China Sea. Should the ships of the PLAN be unable to repel the threat, the PLA Rocket Forces, or PLARF, would intervene to assist.
The DF-26B is one of the newest and longest-ranged missiles in the PLARF inventory. One of China’s most potent countermeasures to American naval supremacy, it is known as the “Guam Killer” because of its range to strike American installations on that island. And that naturally entails engaging in any kind of combat against aircraft carriers in the United States Navy.
Background
According to the National Interest, the DF-21D (Dong Feng-21, CSS-5) is a medium-range, road-mobile ballistic missile that China first unveiled thirty years ago. One description of it is “carrier killer,” or the first anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) in history. It was China’s first solid-fuel roadmobile missile, intended to replace the antiquated Dong Feng-2 (CSS-1). Capable of deploying a 600 kg payload over a minimum range of 500 km (311 miles) and a maximum range of 2,150 km, the warhead of the DF-21D is probably manoeuvrable and might have a 20 m CEP (circular error probable) accuracy.
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Beijing has since produced several DF-21 versions, including a dual nuclear/conventional capability version (DF-21C) and another designated as an anti-ship ballistic missile (DF-21D). The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) also disclosed in 2016 that it thought a new nuclear variant, the DF-21E CSS-5 Mod 6, was also being manufactured.
In the East or South China Seas, two areas Beijing wants to control, such a weapon may prevent a possible opponent from entering a war zone.
China’s DF-26B Missile: An Even Bigger Danger
While the DF-21D might be deployed close to China’s “home waters,” Beijing has also created another missile that could be used to threaten boats traversing most of the Indo-Pacific area.
First shown during a military parade in September 2015, this is the road-mobile, two-stage solid-fueled intermediate-range ballistic missile known as the DF-26B (Dong Feng-26). Reports place its range at 4,000 kilometres (2,485 miles), and it can be employed in nuclear and conventional attacks against naval and land targets.
In the case of war, the mobile launcher should be considered a dangerous weapon because it may immediately strike a target like the U.S. territory of Guam. It can carry a 1,200- to 1,800-kilogram nuclear or conventional warhead. More menacingly, because it may be deployed to attack the fleet of nuclear-powered supercarriers of the U.S. Navy, the DF-26B has been dubbed a carrier killer.
Washington should take the missiles very seriously, and Beijing intended to convey that message in 2020 when it tested both platforms in the South China Sea. The tests took place one day after Beijing charged that the US had sent a U-2 surveillance plane into a “no-fly zone” during a PLAN live-fire naval exercise in the Bohai Sea off the north coast of China.
While the DB-21B missile was fired from the eastern province of Zhejiang, the DF-26B missile was fired from the northwest province of Qinghai. A People’s Liberation Army (PLA) source told the South China Morning Post at the time that both missiles were shot into a region between Hainan Province and Paracel Island. The landing sites lay in an area that Hainan’s marine safety officials had declared would be off-limits due to those military drills.
Not just the US Navy may find itself in the crossfire of PLAN. The DB-21B and DF-26B missiles might be used to attack the aircraft carriers of Japan or India or to attack Taiwan’s warships should Beijing ever launch an invasion of the self-governing island.
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“A ship’s a fool to fight a fort,” British Admiral Horatio Nelson famously said, as quoted by Albert Palazzo of the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia, in an August opinion piece for Breaking Defense.
In the twenty-first century, Palazzo said, “A ship is a fool to fight a missile-defended coast,” and he contended that warships would have to reconsider their operations. It might not be enough to just rule the oceans. Before ships may enter danger, an attacker must first establish local supremacy using land, air, and cyber assets.
That lesson was hard learnt by the Russian Navy in April 2022 when Ukraine sank the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, Moskva, with land-based Neptune missiles. Since the Second World War, this has been the biggest battleship lost in action.
Undoubtedly, the US Navy would not want to top it by losing a carrier of the Nimitz class to a Chinese missile!
Recognition of the danger?
The People’s Republic of China’s expanding military might and combat readiness were examined in the U.S. Department of Defense’s (DoD) yearly China Military Power Report, which was presented to Congress last month.
Beijing presently operates at least 500 missile launchers, of which around 250 can be reloaded and each launcher can hold at least two missiles.
China would need to strike lucky just once to destroy an aircraft carrier, but with the DF-26B and other missiles, it might have 400 to 500 opportunities. For those riding a U.S. flattop, there aren’t fantastic chances.
