Time to Put China's Rocketeers on Notice

Gabe Collins

Security, Asia

A Sea-Based Pershing II missile can blunt China's A2/AD threat and help restore regional strategic balance.

Speed kills. This simple but powerful concept applies in spades to strike assets—particularly when speed and lethality can be obtained at sufficiently low costs to be deployed at scale. Consider, for instance, China’s intensive investment in ballistic missiles as part of its ongoing anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategy aimed at restricting U.S. forces’ capacity to operate and project power along the country’s maritime periphery during a potential conflict.

The current crop of U.S. precision-strike platforms, especially those with the standoff range to cope with an increasingly deadly People’s Liberation Army integrated air-defense system, tend to be expensive or launched by scarce and expensive aircraft and fly slowly. To blunt China’s growing asymmetric advantage and retain strategic credibility with regional allies, U.S. forces need a prompt regional strike capability that is reliable, cost-effective and legal. Modernizing and improving the MGM-31 Pershing II medium-range ballistic missile design and deploying it at sea would fulfill all three requirements.

First, the Pershing system uses a fully developed, 1980s-vintage airframe that could be resurrected, mated with modern guidance and warhead systems, and pressed into service much more rapidly and cost-effectively than new hypersonic weapons systems built from scratch. The core challenge in producing Pershing II missiles, or a modernized follow-on version, centers on retooling and training the workers responsible for the manufacturing process, rather than developing entirely new systems and technologies from the ground up, which is what the Pentagon’s Prompt Global Strike program is doing with the Advanced Hypersonic Weapon. The fact that a Pershing II derivative can likely be brought into service more quickly than other hypersonic strike systems would allow it to play an important “gap filler” role as the Pentagon builds out a full hypersonic weapons portfolio.