Communist China is practicing to sink American aircraft carriers and boasting about hypersonic missiles. To safeguard freedom on the high seas, we can neither undersell the threat nor cower below decks. 

Although the Western press heralds the People’s Liberation Army’s navy as the world’s largest, America — like Britannia in the 1800s — still rules the waves.

“We’re almost always going to have adversaries,” President Obama’s secretary of the Navy, Raymond E. Mabus, told me in response to Beijing’s threats, adding that “it’s crucial that we remain innovative and flexible and not wedded to, ‘That’s the way we do things here.’” 

Our democratic system has an edge over communism there. Citizens in a free society think and act as individuals, rather than following the party line for fear of reprisal.

Yet complacency is a chronic American problem. Since America’s first carrier, USS Langley, was commissioned 100 years ago, our nation has been confident that our flat-tops can project power anywhere in the globe, keeping conflicts Over There.

To break us, enemy nations would have to send those ships to the bottom, which is why the Imperial Japanese aimed to sink our Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. Their failure — due to Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga being away from the attack — enabled us to take the war to the Rising Sun in the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo four months later, Midway three months after that, and on to final victory. 

When it comes to crushing the Republic of China, Communist China has learned that history and doesn’t aim to repeat the Empire’s mistake, so we can’t repeat ours.  

For a decade, Red China has been honing its skills on mock-ups of an American carrier group in the Taklamakan Desert. Last week, the communist-controlled Global Times reported that “the PLA’s conventional missile launches practiced hitting foreign aircraft carriers that could intervene,” in defense of Free China. 

Those attacks were carried out with both conventional missiles and Beijing’s new hypersonic DF-17, which that same state media describes as an “aircraft carrier killer.”

America is preparing to counter the threat. The chief of naval operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, told a House committee the Navy has “doubled its investment in hypersonic weapons to support future mission requirements.” While headlines warning about hypersonic missiles stoke fear, the weapons aren’t invincible and the technology isn’t new. 

It dates back to Nazi Germany in the 1930s. “Don’t believe the hype,” physicist David Wright and material scientist Cameron L. Tracy wrote for the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum in February 2021. “[T]he results of computational modeling of hypersonic missile flight [show] that many common claims regarding their capabilities range from overblown to simply false.”

Beijing’s bark may be worse than its bite, like the hair-on-fire descriptions of Saddam Hussein’s “million-man army” before its swift defeat in Desert Storm.

This brings us to a second point from Secretary Mabus. “Be realistic, but don’t build up — in our minds and thinking — a potential adversary to unreasonable lengths.”

As Beijing stages its show of force around Free China, it is attempting to cow the republic and its American allies into submission. “The greatest victory,” as Sun Tzu said, “is that which requires no battle.”

Yet the island’s people have read Sun Tzu as well and may counter that he “[w]ho wishes to fight must first count the cost.”

As Communist China tallies the price of an invasion, America is working to ensure that there’s too much red in the ledger for Beijing to let slip the dogs of war. “All things considered,” Secretary Mabus concluded, “I’d much, much rather be in our position than any potential adversary.”

That’s encouraging — as is our preparation to counter the hypersonic missile threat amid all the saber rattling and reports of the PLA Navy’s military might.

It’s worth remembering that 80 years ago, America knew the Imperial Japanese might attack Hawaii as well, and we were still caught unprepared. This time, we can’t rely on luck to save our mighty carriers. Safeguard them at all costs, to ensure that Taiwan remains free, and that this new totalitarian foe never rules the waves.