Clearing a Path

As American ships learn to approach the Asian continent with caution because of China's growing ability to attack ships far out to sea with aircraft and missiles, we need weapons to clear a path for our carriers to get close enough to use their aircraft. Here's one of those weapons (from my Jane's email updates):

The US Navy (USN) and Raytheon Missile Systems are advancing plans to develop a maritime interdiction modification package for the Tomahawk Block IV cruise missile to meet an urgent USN requirement for a so-called Interim Offensive Anti-Surface Warfare (OASuW) missile. Known as Multi-Mission Tomahawk (MMT), the projected near-term anti-ship weapon will be created by adding a new moving target seeker and upgraded datalink to the existing Block IV system baseline, creating a semi-autonomous weapon capable of detection, discrimination and terminal guidance to a moving maritime target[.]

It's nice to see we are finally moving on this plan [Link corrected]. And this is just the interim plan for what we really want.

This pretty much symbolizes the change of our Navy from a focus on power projection to sea control. Once, cruise missiles were the symbol of our ability to project power to distant shores against enemies without navies. Now our cruise missiles will be used to contest another navy's ability to deny us control of the seas.