A Chinese wargame hints it can blind a cutting-edge US missile. That may be a mind game.

• In a rare move, China publicized a wargame in which US ships sank a top Chinese warship.
• In that simulation, the Chinese ship succeeded in temporarily blinding the incoming US missiles.
• The Chinese wargame is highly irregular and smacks of disinformation, naval experts said.

In a recent Chinese wargame, US missiles sank one of China's most powerful warships. So why does China appear to be happy about that result?

The answer may be that China is signaling that it knows the secrets of America's prime ship-killing missile. Or — as some Western analysts suggest — China could be trying to undermine America's confidence in its own weapons.

The wargame was disclosed to the public in early January by the South China Morning Post, citing a November paper in the Chinese journal Command Control & Simulation. The game, run by the North China Institute of Computing Technology, involved a Chinese carrier battle group sailing in the South China Sea near the Pratas island, which are controlled by Taiwan but claimed by China.

For reasons unspecified, the Chinese task force was attacked by a US carrier strike group, which targeted a Type 055 destroyer escorting the Chinese carrier. The new Type 055 — a 13,000-ton destroyer that the Pentagon classifies as a cruiser — is a formidable vessel armed with 112 launchers capable of firing anti-ship, anti-aircraft and land-attack cruise missiles.

"The US military suddenly began a large-scale attack on the Chinese fleet, with one wave of 10 AGM-158C Long Range Anti-Ship Missiles (LRASMs) launched simultaneously from different platforms," according to the Morning Post.

The Lockheed Martin-built LRASM is a stealthy, subsonic cruise missile with an estimated range of at least 200 miles. Equipped with multiple guidance systems, LRASM features GPS as well as onboard radar and thermal sensors to home in on the target if satellite-based GPS is jammed.

In the Chinese simulation, the US destroyers launched LRASM, which initially rose to high altitude and then descended to skim close to the sea to try to delay their detection by radar, the Morning Post said. "When they were about 10 kilometers [6.2 miles] away from the target, their radars malfunctioned one after another due to electronic warfare interference from the [People's Liberation Army], and they were unable to receive GPS positioning signals."

"At this point, the missiles switched to thermal imaging cameras to continue flying and, at a very close distance from the target, they suddenly rose up, confirmed the specific attack location, and then plunged to an extremely low altitude, successfully hitting the Chinese destroyer."

Chinese researchers claimed to have gleaned details of the LRASM from open-source intelligence and "long-term accumulation. Yet even the Morning Post — owned by e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has close ties to the Chinese government — admitted that it couldn't use public information to verify the accuracy of the missile's depiction in the game.

'Humble brag'

That China would include the new LRASM in its wargames is no surprise: the missile, with an estimated range of at least 200 miles, would be key to any American attempt to defend Taiwan from Chinese invasion. What did surprise Western analysts was that China felt it had enough knowledge of LRASM, such as its guidance systems, to model them in a game.

Also notable was that the Chinese government must have given its permission for Chinese media and defense journals to publish the results of a wargame that typically has been classified. When nations learn the secrets of enemy weapons, through espionage or other means, they are wary about tipping off the enemy.

British naval experts offer another potential explanation: China is playing mind games with America. "Although framed as a 'humble brag' with the loss of a PLAN [People's Liberation Army Navy] destroyer, the article clearly advertised a certain Chinese confidence in the inevitable arms race in which China and the US, as technological world leaders, are engaged," said Edward Black and Sidharth Kaushal in an essay for the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

Black and Kaushal point to several glaring aspects of the Chinese wargame. For example, the simulation assumes that the Chinese destroyer successfully jammed the LRASM's passive radar, which homes in on electronic signals from enemy ships rather than emitting its own waves that return as an active radar does. In fact, China has been developing methods to jam passive radar, such as feeding it false signals.

"The PLA's claimed success here would, if true, have ramifications both for the survivability of missiles with a low radar cross-section (which the PLA is implicitly claiming the ability to track) and for US naval efforts at emissions control and the use of passive detection," the RUSI researchers note. In addition, the game portrays LRASM's GPS being jammed, which suggests Chinese confidence that it can defeat anti-jam features on American GPS.

The British experts — and Chinese social media — also point out a curious omission: the Type 055 destroyer only used electronic warfare to stop the LRASMs, even though the ship is well-armed with HHQ-9 and HHQ-10 anti-aircraft missiles as well as a short-range air defense cannon. Yet the destroyer must have detected the LRASMs to jam their passive radar, and radar tracking would allow the crew to fire these interceptors to knock out the incoming missiles.

Since each LRASM has a 1,000-pound warhead that can devastate a warship, it's highly unusual to rely on electronic warfare alone and at such close range (only 6 miles) to down an incoming salvo of missiles. Even in the presence of jamming, LRASM could still lock onto the ship's thermal exhaust via infrared guidance. A warship is also unlikely to rely only on electronic warfare against missiles that close: if jamming fails, there's no time to launch missile interceptors and hardly enough for a gun to track and fire at multiple incoming missiles.

Black and Kaushal raise a truly Machiavellian possibility for why China is publicizing the wargame: Disinformation to undermine American confidence in LRASM. Precise details of the LRASM's performance, such as its maximum range, are classified. If China is modeling the LRASM in their wargames, then perhaps Beijing has managed to steal the missile's secrets?

Not likely, conclude the British analysts. "If the PLA [People's Liberation Army] was truly confident in its success in accessing sensitive data, it would have strong incentives to keep this private to achieve surprise in a conflict rather than alerting the US to the compromise of critical systems," Black and Kaushal said.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.