China is reportedly preparing to arm Iran with supersonic anti-ship missiles capable of striking U.S. naval vessels nearly 200 miles away.
While the world watches the skies over Iran, China just changed what happens in the water.
Reuters confirmed today that Iran is nearing a deal to acquire CM-302 supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles from China. Mach 3. Sea-skimming. 290-kilometer range. A 250-kilogram warhead designed by the same corporation that built the YJ-12, the missile the PLA created to sink American carriers in a Taiwan scenario.
China is handing Iran the weapon built to defeat Aegis.
The CM-302 flies at three times the speed of sound in its terminal phase, hugging wave tops below radar coverage, executing evasive maneuvers before impact. An Aegis destroyer has roughly 8 to 15 seconds to detect, track, and engage it. Against a single missile, manageable. Against a salvo from dispersed mobile launchers along 1,500 kilometers of Iranian coastline, the math inverts. The defender runs out of interceptors before the attacker runs out of missiles.
The Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide. The Persian Gulf at its widest is 340 kilometers. A CM-302 launched from a truck, a cave, or a fishing port on the Iranian coast puts every surface combatant in the Gulf inside the kill zone.
The timing is the tell. Reuters reports negotiations accelerated after Midnight Hammer in June. Iran watched the US destroy Fordow with 125 aircraft and concluded it needed the one capability that makes the next strike cost a warship. China obliged, publicly, through Reuters, the same week 11 F-22s landed in Israel and two carrier groups converged.
Yesterday China published satellite imagery showing US ships leaving Bahrain. Today China is selling Iran the missile to reach them.
The US House Select Committee on China responded within hours, calling to revoke Beijing’s trade status and impose 35 to 100 percent tariffs. That is not a trade committee reacting to an arms deal. That is a national security establishment recognizing that China just armed the adversary with the specific weapon designed to threaten the specific platforms deployed for the strike.
Iran’s 5,000 mines were the known strait threat. Kilo submarines the undersea threat. Swarm boats the surface threat. The CM-302 fills the gap between all three: too fast for point defense, too low for area defense, too mobile for pre-emptive strike.
China just handed Iran the capability that moves the cost from “manageable retaliation” to “potential loss of a capital ship.”
And the receipt will be written on the hull of a destroyer. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans
posted by Satish Sharma at
08:29
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