Notes to the New CNO Series

By Nicholas Weising

Admiral Daryl Caudle’s tenure as CNO began on August 25th, 2025, meaning his four-year term includes the end of the Davidson window in 2027, when China will have reached its milestone of developing sufficient defense capability to forcefully annex Taiwan. The key to China succeeding is maintaining their anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) approach intended to keep adversary forces out of the first island chain. U.S. Navy operational concepts must make an explicit priority of targeting the C4ISR architecture that fundamentally enables China’s A2/AD approach and have it serve as a core organizing principle for Navy acquisition and force development.

The center of China’s A2/AD strategy involves long-range precision-strike (LRPS) missiles, encompassing anti-ship, anti-air, and anti-surface capabilities. The DF-21D is a road-mobile ballistic missile capable of targeting a moving carrier strike group at 1,450 kilometers away. The DF-26 is an intermediate-range ballistic missile capable of hitting Guam, Okinawa, and other American military installations in the region. The DF-17 is a road-mobile missile that delivers a hypersonic glide vehicle that can penetrate air and missile defenses. These are the primary long-range conventional weapons the PLA Rocket Force (PLARF) has at its disposal. The PLARF’s LRPS capabilities can attack carrier strike groups and military bases across the First Island Chain and up to the Second Island Chain on short notice.

The ability to establish and contest air control over Taiwan would be pivotal in any scenario, but the effects of China’s A2/AD posture are most acute in the air domain. Advanced sensors, integrated air defenses, and surface-to-air missile systems create a highly contested environment. Aircraft are limited by endurance and mission availability rates, meaning they cannot maintain presence indefinitely. Even the most capable U.S. jet fighter today has a combat radius of only about 600 nautical miles without aerial refueling. This constraint goes back to the origins of modern airpower. Fighter aircraft were first designed for the European theater, where dense networks of airfields exist. Meanwhile, the Indo-Pacific has vast stretches of water and land separated by hundreds or thousands of miles. In a Taiwan contingency, sorties from Japan or Korea would almost certainly require midair refueling and would struggle to maintain a consistent presence in the battlespace. This is why carriers remain indispensable. Yet the PLARF LRPS capabilities threaten to box carriers out of the region.

C4ISR capabilities enable A2/AD architecture. Admiral Caudle should treat C4ISR as the principal target in any campaign against the PLA and develop the Navy accordingly. The CNO must prioritize a layered approach that targets hostile sensing and command and control, while reinforcing friendly sensing and command links to create decision advantage. The CNO should scale up electronic warfare and cyber teams so they can effectively deny enemy ISR, disrupt missile targeting, and a play a more predominant role in wartime naval operations. The CNO should invest in communication architectures that can survive contested environments and accelerate investments in space-based sensors to create more distributed killchains. At the same time, the Navy should also invest in deception methods to complicate enemy targeting, and rehearse operations in degraded conditions so commanders and crews can operate confidently when links are contested.

Neutralizing Chinese C4ISR should be a top CNO priority, and serve as an organizing principle for guiding the investment of resources, the design of exercises, and the management of acquisition. Such an approach will maximize the competitiveness of the U.S. Navy.

Nicholas Weising is a Program Assistant at the Center for Maritime Strategy.

Featured Image: A KJ-500 airborne early warning (AEW) aircraft attached to an aviation regiment with the navy under the PLA Southern Theater Command prepares to take off for a real-combat flight training exercise on January 9, 2020. (eng.chinamil.com.cn/Photo by Qin Qianjiang and Zeng Qi)