Flipping the Script: How to Hold China’s New Carriers at Risk

Photo: Pu Haiyang/Xinhua/Getty Images

Photo: Pu Haiyang/Xinhua/Getty Images

Report by Benjamin Jensen, Mackenzie Eaglen, Henry H. Carroll, and Harold "Bud" Bishop

Published August 3, 2026

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China’s expanding aircraft carrier fleet creates a strategic vulnerability that the United States and its allies can exploit. While debate has long focused on the threat posed by China’s anti-access/area-denial network to U.S. carriers, Chinese carriers are also large, visible, and difficult-to-replace platforms that depend on vulnerable sensor, communications, logistics, and escort networks. The United States can therefore employ a cost-imposition strategy designed to make routine Chinese carrier operations prohibitively risky. This report identifies five mutually reinforcing approaches: forward subsurface ambush forces, distributed land-based maritime strike networks, long-range air and space-enabled fires, cyber and electromagnetic attacks, and unmanned swarm and port-denial operations.

Implementing a cost-imposition strategy would require U.S. naval reforms, including building more torpedoes and undersea drones, strengthening Marine and Army littoral forces to guard chokepoints, shifting the future fleet toward roughly 300 crewed and 300 uncrewed ships, and producing missiles jointly with allies such as Australia and Japan. The goal is to make China’s carrier program a costly liability rather than a winning advantage.

This report is made possible by general support to CSIS. No direct sponsorship contributed to this report.

Tags

Asia, China, North America, Defense Budget and Acquisition, Defense and Security, Geopolitics and International Security, Maritime Issues and Oceans, and Missile Defense
Benjamin Jensen

Benjamin Jensen

Director, Futures Lab and Senior Fellow, Defense and Security Department

Mackenzie Eaglen

Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Henry Carroll

Henry H. Carroll

Former Research Associate, Center for the Industrial Base

Harold "Bud" Bishop

Retired U.S. Navy Captain

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