China’s military uses fake US aircraft carrier for missile target practice

The Chinese military is using mock-ups of a US aircraft carrier at a weapons-testing range in a remote western desert, new satellite imagery shows, indicating the People’s Liberation Army is focused on neutralising a key tool of US power.

Satellite images show targets in the shape of a carrier and two Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers at a testing facility in the Taklamakan desert in Xinjiang, according to the news website of the US Naval Institute. Both types of vessels are deployed by the US Seventh Fleet, which patrols the Western Pacific including the waters around Taiwan.

The site is clear to satellites, a sign that Beijing is trying to show Washington what its missile forces can do. In August last year, the Chinese military executed a coordinated test launch of the “carrier killer” DF-21D missiles into the South China Sea, an action that the former head of the US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Phil Davidson later told a Senate panel was intended as an “unmistakable message”.

The DF-21D is central to China’s strategy of deterring military action off its eastern coast by threatening to destroy the major sources of US power projection in the region, its carrier battle groups. The then head of Naval Intelligence vice-admiral Jack Dorsett saod in January 2011 that the Pentagon had underestimated the speed at which China developed and was fielding the DF-21D.