But they start off handing me the equivalent of two plastic "boards" connected by a big plastic "nail" they hammered into them, proudly calling it the Golden Gate Bridge:
The Pentagon has a long history of hyping the Chinese threat to justify expensive weapons purchases, and sinking well-defended ships with ballistic missiles is notoriously hard.
I'll ignore the first half. It's a fair cop, although no less true than the Times' long history of minimizing any threat from any place to justify canceling any expensive weapons purchases (or their global warming crusade, I suppose).
No, let's just dwell on the last part about how the DF-21 could sink carrier task forces, but that it is "notoriously hard" to sink "well-defended ships" with them.
To clarify, it is notoriously hard to sink a cruise ship with a ballistic missile. The fact that a carrier is well defended against aircraft, surface ships, anti-ship cruise missiles, and submarines is irrelevant to its ability to defend against a ballistic missile. It is the finding and tracking of the target that is the hard part.
So the reason that a working DF-21 system is so dangerous to our carriers is that the missiles scream in at speeds too high for any defenses beyond circular error probable to do any good. As I said, a cruise ship--if it got the same launch warning our carrier got--would have chances no better or worse than a carrier in avoiding a DF-21.
So I stopped reading before I could get to the actual procurement recommendations the editors were touting to compete with the Chinese. If they don't undertand the basic concept of anti-ship ballistic missiles, what hope do they have of delving into strategery, eh?
It's just so cute when their editors pretend to understand military matters!
