China is testing anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) in the desert in its western Xinjiang's Taklamakan desert but with the complete focus on the Pacific, said a report.
China has built an accurate mock-up of the deck of a Ford-class aircraft carrier at a missile test range in the Taklamakan desert in western Xinjiang Province, according to photos taken by satellite imagery company Maxar on behalf of the US Naval Institute on November 7, 2021, reported The National Interest.
A seventy-five-meter-long ship-like target put on six-meter-wide rails, as well as extremely detailed copies of two US Arleigh-Burke-class guided-missile destroyers and at least two additional carrier-shaped targets, were also sighted.
An anti-ship ballistic missile is a military ballistic missile system designed to hit a warship at sea
These efforts are also definitely aimed at improving the test range's ability to provide more realistic practice targets for China's developing anti-ship ballistic missile arsenal (ASBMs).
The mockups at the Taklamakan location are not China's first carrier-like practise targets; since 2003, a crude concrete pad has been used as a practice target at Shuangchengzi, and a mockup near the present site has been targeted in missile tests in 2013.
The latest mockups, on the other hand, are significantly more detailed depictions of US Navy ships.
The present equipment was installed and then destroyed in 2019, according to United States Naval Institute (USNI), before being reassembled in September 2021 based on previous satellite photos. The new site contains a lot of instrumentation to collect data on missile hits, but no impact craters, implying that the location hasn't been used for missile tests yet.
Despite their incredible speed and range, ASBMs have never been employed in combat, and there is some question over how reliable their terminal infrared- or radar-guidance seekers would be in hitting moving targets.
China is expected to deploy ASBMs on its H-6 strategic bombers and Type 055 missile cruisers, according to reports.
Since Beijing first showed its DF-21D "carrier killer" missile in 2009, these weapons, which, unlike the more regularly deployed naval cruise missile, lift far into space before diving down at extraordinary speeds.
The DF-21D, which is mounted on a mobile truck launcher to make pre-emptive killing more difficult, has a maximum range of almost 900 miles. That implies it could threaten to destroy or severely damage massive US Navy supercarriers from far beyond the strike range of its onboard warplanes, reports the think tank.
Since then, China has displayed numerous additional ASBM-type missiles, including the DF-26B, which has a range of up to 2,500 miles and could sink ships at the US naval station in Guam, as well as other shorter-range ASBM missiles.
( With inputs from ANI )
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