(Washington, D.C.) Could a Chinese-fired hypersonic weapon sink or destroy a U.S. aircraft carrier with a single shot, before ship commanders have an opportunity to defend against it?
The exact extent to which the Chinese DF-17 hypersonic missile can do damage, and the state of its progress toward possible operational service, may still remain somewhat unknown. However, saying the U.S. Navy is likely to take the threat very seriously, could probably qualify as an understatement.
Carrier defenses are increasingly layered, multi-domain and equipped with new avenues of protection to include EW, laser interceptors and aerial nodes able to network threat information to surface ships. The question is, just how much could some of these new defensive innovations succeed in finding, tracking and destroying an approaching hypersonic weapon.
An interesting report in The Drive’s Warzone, claims that the DF-17 “carrier killer” can hit speeds of Mach 10, a speed reported to be 7,600 mph. While the DF-17’s guidance system or ultimate range are not specified by the report, The Drive does say that the weapon is capable of “advanced maneuvers,” and posits that a single shot of the weapon could likely disable, sink or destroy a U.S. Ford-class carrier.
Could advanced carrier defenses stop the weapon? Maybe, but any kind of defense would of course first and foremost rely upon an ability to discover, identify, track or simply find the approaching weapon. Is the weapon simply too fast for any integrated ship defense system to perform any kind of functional response? Maybe .. or maybe not.
U.S. Carrier Defenses
Depending upon speed and distance of detection, there are several variables which might offer ship-defenses an opportunity to avoid destruction. Even weapons traveling at Mach 10 will rely upon some kind of guidance system in order to be effective, a factor which introduces the question as to just how precise a weapon moving at that speed could be? That may be unknown, and the fastest weapon of all time, while not useless, is unlikely to accomplish much without advanced guidance and ability to hit moving targets.
The missile will likely emit some kind of electronic signal, at some point in its flight if even its launch point, something which might make it “jammable” or susceptible to some kind of EW defense.
