When the U.S. Navy’s newest and most advanced aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford deployed for the first time in October 2022, analysts expressed concern that the $13.3 billion behemoth was dead on arrival. Standing nine stories above the waterline, complete with a five-acre flight deck and capacity for four squadrons of fighter jets, the ship instantly became the largest and most expensive to ever sail—a formidable platform projecting American naval superiority and American naval vulnerability.

Despite all of her technical prowess, Ford is faced with a harsh reality: over the last two decades, China’s hypersonic missile technology has far outpaced America’s. Beijing has “the world’s leading hypersonic missile arsenal,” according to a December 2024 report from the U.S. Department of Defense—and it only takes one successful anti-ship missile strike to destroy even the most powerful floating air base.

In the event that China makes an amphibious landing on Taiwan, which experts expect will take place by 2027, China’s suite of hypersonic missiles “can take out our 10 aircraft carriers in the first 20 minutes of a conflict,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth[1] said in a November interview that has recently resurfaced. “China is building an army specifically designed to destroy the U.S.,” Hegseth continued.

China has developed powerful weapons to destroy U.S. Aircraft Carriers. The effects could be devastating.

The United States has been the world’s foremost master of carrier warfare since World War II. While other countries operate their own flat tops—most notably, China, who has ramped up carrier production at a break-neck pace in the last decade or so—none have matched the size and scale of the U.S. Navy. Each of its 11 world-class aircraft carriers is a seagoing city capable of projecting military power across the globe, with each ship operating approximately 70+ aircraft, measuring 1,100 feet long, and housing 4,500–5,000 sailors and Marines. If every carrier went to sea at once, just those 11 carriers would account for approximately 55,000 personnel at sea.

However, these impressive numbers are a double-edged sword. If even a single carrier were sunk, it would take a tremendous bite out of the Navy’s combat capabilities and inflict a staggering loss of life; if one Ford- or Nimitz-class carrier were sunk with all hands, it would exceed U.S. deaths in the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq in a single day. And as the Chinese military grows, the threat to carriers in a U.S.-China war is becoming more acute. In 2023, a wargame simulation run by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank affiliated with Georgetown University, predicted the U.S. would prevail in a conflict over Taiwan—but at a loss of two aircraft carriers.

So, what exactly are the major threats to America’s hulking aircraft carriers, how does the Navy plan to defend them, and is there any alternative to the fleet, which the service calls its “4.5 acres of sovereign American territory” at sea?

U.S. flat top vulnerabilities boil down to the fact that “great powers like China and Russia have powerful weapons designed specifically for taking out aircraft carriers.” If the U.S. decides it cannot risk its carriers in areas these weapons can reach, it’s effectively denied the ability to enter into or operate there, a strategy known as “Anti-Access/Area Denial.”

China has a wide array of land-based systems that pose a serious threat to surface ships operating within its littoral areas, with the threat becoming more dense as the ships get nearer. Air-launched anti-ship cruise missiles, such as YJ-12, have ranges of 290 and 110 nautical miles respectively, but they are launched from aircraft with significant ranges of their own.”

In addition, China has a large inventory of ballistic missiles, and in recent years has modified them to engage warships at sea. The DF-21 and the DF-26 [missiles] are launched from the Chinese mainland with ranges of approximately 930 and 1,800 nautical miles respectively. Of course, for any of these, the firing unit must have targeting information, and denying targeting is a major way to give carrier strike groups protection. But, once targeted, carrier strike groups have a serious defense problem.

Russia also has cruise missiles and long-range bombers, but their targeting and strike capabilities are considerably less than those of China. Russia has developed the Zircon hypersonic anti-ship missile, the focus here has been mainly on China.”

These weapons, while formidable, would face equally formidable defenses. Since the beginning of the Second World War, aircraft carriers have been surrounded by escorts whose job is to defend the carrier against air or subsurface attack. That remains the practice today. The capability of these escorts is much greater than in the past, but the function is exactly what you would have seen with the carrier strike group in second world war.

An aircraft carrier goes to sea as the centerpiece of a Carrier Strike Group (CSG), which includes escorting cruisers and guided missile destroyers with anti-air and space weapons including the SM-2, SM-3, and SM-6 series of Standard interceptor missiles and the ASROC anti-submarine rocket torpedo. Guided missile destroyers, with some cruisers left in the inventory, will defend aircraft carriers with Standard missiles. Those missiles are controlled by the Aegis weapons systems on the ships, which are linked across the battle force. The linked systems provide a coordinated view of the battlespace and allow the effective stationing and control of defending aircraft, and ships.

Carriers also include non-kinetic means of defending themselves, designed to seduce or lure away enemy missiles. Carrier Strike Groups possess a number of means to frustrate targeting, generate false targets, decoy inbound missiles, and otherwise make location and targeting difficult.

It may not even be necessary to sink a carrier to put it out of commission. Although sinking an aircraft carrier might be difficult, mission kills from damaging the flight deck and combat systems might be easier to achieve. China has a deep magazine of long-range weapons and a located carrier would be very difficult to defend and keep operating.” U.S. Navy carriers, nuclear-powered and capable of repositioning hundreds of miles in an afternoon, would endeavor to keep up the fight while moving to avoid being located.

The U.S. Navy has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in its carrier fleet, both in ships and aircraft. But the challenge in thinking about aircraft carriers is that they are extremely useful for crisis response and regional conflicts but potentially vulnerable in great power conflicts.” As the era of regional conflicts is arguably winding down while great power conflict is on the rise, it’s worthwhile to ask if the aircraft carrier is putting too many eggs in a single basket. The solution might be smaller baskets—or might not involve a basket at all.

These assertions fall in line with the Pentagon’s priority of developing Navy laser weapons that can neutralize the hypersonic threat. Ford is equipped to support about two dozen emerging technologies, and if a true laser weapon were among them, the thinking goes, the lasers would fire at the speed of light, negating the effect of hypersonics, which fly at speeds greater than five times the speed of sound.

Consider the DF-17, a medium-range Chinese hypersonic missile that can reportedly reach speeds of Mach 10 (10 times the speed of sound) and attack from more than 1,500 miles away. This missile does not fly in a conventional arc, but remains highly maneuverable as it reenters the atmosphere, meaning it can change its trajectory and direction while in flight. A weapon of this caliber is unpredictable and, therefore, more difficult to intercept. But a laser weapon powered by Ford’s advanced A1B nuclear reactors could fire thousands or tens of thousands of times at a weapon like DF-17, tracking and targeting it better than conventional missiles.

That said, the United States is still years away from a reliable, high-powered laser weapon capable of taking out hypersonic missiles.

To thwart a hypersonic missile, the Navy needs something much more powerful on the order of 300 kilowatts. Enter HELCAP, the High Energy Laser Counter-Anti-Ship Cruise Missile Program. The Navy transferred its research from the Laser Weapons System Demonstrator program to the HELCAP program, which will “expedite the development, experimentation, integration and demonstration of critical technologies to defeat crossing Anti-Ship Cruise Missiles (ASCM) by addressing the remaining technical challenges,” according to the service’s fiscal year 2025 budget submission.

Even HELCAP won’t be strong enough to destroy an anti-ship hypersonic missile, though. That will take a 1-megawatt laser, the Pentagon believes—and it can’t come soon enough.

For her part, Ford is a transformational aircraft carrier that will serve well into the 2050s with next-generation technologies that we haven’t yet seen. But given the proliferation of weapons like DF-17, she is perhaps more vulnerable now than her contemporaries have been in the last 80 years. If the Navy can expedite development of a high-power ship-mounted laser weapon—a HELCAP+, if you will—before China invades Taiwan, Ford may sail the seas without a worthy opponent to fear.

[1] « Hegseth: Chinese hypersonic missiles could destroy U.S. carriers in minutes » By Bill Gertz – The Washington Times – Wednesday, April 16, 2025. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/apr/16/pentagon-chief-believes-chinese-hypersonics-could-destroy-us-carriers/