Can a do-it-all missile fix the US Navys China problem?

The US Navy is betting that a new modular, multi-mission missile can stretch shrinking magazines and blunt China’s missile advantage in a Taiwan fight—but critics warn that unless it is cheap and mass-produced, versatility alone may not be enough to change the outcome.

This month, Naval News reported that the US Navy is developing a next-generation missile designed to support hypersonic strike, long-range offensive counter-air and layered air and missile defense missions, as the service confronts increasingly complex threats from Russia and China.

Speaking at the Surface Navy Association’s annual symposium in Arlington, Virginia, Rear Admiral Derek Trinque, director of surface warfare development for the US Navy, said the planned missile will succeed the decades-old Standard Missile (SM) family by using a modular propulsion design and open-architecture approach.

The concept relies on a common interceptor stage combined with different propulsion “stacks,” allowing the weapon to be configured either as a full-cell hypersonic or long-range strike missile, or as smaller, multi-packed interceptors for air and missile defense inside a single Mark 41 vertical launch system (VLS) cell.

Trinque said the new missile would sharply expand magazine depth aboard Arleigh Burke-class destroyers and aging Ticonderoga-class cruisers, which face growing pressure to counter drones, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and hypersonic weapons while retaining strike capacity.

That push comes as US missile inventories are already under strain. In a June 2024 Heritage Foundation article, Jim Fein mentions that in 2023, the US procured approximately a total of 12,000 SM-2s, 400 SM-3s, 1,500 SM-6s, and 9,000 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAM)—the primary VLS-launched weapons.

During the same year, Fein says the US used at least 2,800 SMs and 2,900 TLAMs, leaving roughly 11,000 SM-series and 6,000 TLAMs, totaling about 17,000 VLS missiles.

Fein cautions that these figures likely overstate usable inventories, as many missiles are reserved for training, lost to attrition, or retired, citing Wall Street Journal (WSJ) estimates suggesting the US may have had only around 4,000 TLAMs in 2020. He adds that operational constraints mean not all missiles are available in the relevant theater for resupply.

Lara Seligman and Matt Berg also mention in a December 2023 Politico article that the US Navy’s 2023 engagements with Houthis in the Red Sea highlight a huge cost asymmetry, with the former using multi-million-dollar missiles to shoot down the latter’s one-way attack drones costing anywhere between $2,000 to $20,000 – an unsustainable cost ratio.

Those figures sharpen concerns about how the US would sustain a conflict with China over Taiwan. Putting that into perspective, Mark Cancian and other writers mention in a January 2023 Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) report that in a US-China conflict over Taiwan, US and allied missile defenses would be rapidly saturated, making interceptor-heavy defense against China impractical.

According to Cancian and others, there will be too many incoming missiles for active defense to protect airfields and surface ships adequately, pointing out that a single Chinese 12-bomber strike could launch over 200 missiles, illustrating the scale of missile exchanges and why defensive inventories would be strained.

The situation is similar for offensive strikes, as Gregory Poling notes for War on the Rocks, that the size and number of China’s artificial islands in the South China Sea could mean that it may take 300 missiles to destroy major outposts in the Spratlys, such as Fiery Cross Reef, 100 for Woody Island in the Paracels, and dozens of missiles for smaller outposts.

Comparing the US cost-ratio versus the Houthis and China, Jan van Told mentions in a January 2025 article for The War Zone (TWZ) that People’s Liberation Army (PLA) raid density will be far higher than the relative dribbles of Houthi attacks.

Furthermore, Mike Fredenburg mentions in an October 2025 Responsible Statecraft article that while the US could sustain a lopsided missile cost ratio against weaker adversaries such as the Houthis and Iran, the potential costs against a near-peer adversary such as China could rise to unsustainable levels.

But can a do-it-all missile solve the US’s missile magazine depth and cost-exchange ratio woes?

Sidharth Kaushal and other writers highlight in an October 2023 Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) report that dual-purpose interceptors, which perform both air defense and strike functions, can be more cost-effective than maintaining two separate systems for strike and defense, despite their higher costs. They suggest that when used near the enemy during offensive operations, short-range strike-intercepting munitions could potentially be more economical than descent-phase interceptors.

However, Connor Keating argues in an October 2023 Proceedings article that in simulations, Chinese forces won despite the US being able to shoot down anti-ship cruise missiles. Keating points out that when both sides fired 12 missiles, the Chinese side won despite having weaker defenses and staying power, and that the US would not win if it generated more than double China’s striking power.

Keating says that the simulation justifies the need for a cheap, single-purpose anti-ship cruise missile over expensive, multi-role missiles such as the SM-6, which cannot be produced fast enough or in sufficient numbers.

He also notes that current US anti-ship cruise missiles cost as much as the $2.1 million interceptors designed to shoot them down. He says a low‑cost, mass‑produced missile restores the numerical advantage modern naval combat demands.

If the US Navy can turn the modular missile into a mass-produced, multi-packed weapon, it could ease magazine and cost-exchange pressures in a Taiwan fight—but if complexity slows output, the concept risks becoming an elegant answer to a problem of scale it cannot solve.