think about the ASBM (Anti-Ship Ballistic Missile) attack mode in terms of direct hit by a single, conventional warhead or, at most, MIRVs. The countermeasures are also centered around how to defeat this intuitive attack mode. But, in reality, the attack mode by a single, conventional warhead is just one of many possible modes. PLA is not that simple-minded, or stupid, to let the ABM system have a chance to work at all!
One of the actual ASBM attack modes to be employed is not to use a single, conventional warhead, or MIRVS in the first wave of attacks. Instead, it employs a shotgun-EMP-combination type of approach. SM-3 may be able (a big maybe!) to counter a single warhead, but how can you counter a rain of thousands of super-hardened small pellets on your head?
Take DF-26 as an example. It can carry a warhead weighing 1-ton+ to strike a target 5,000 kms away. A single 1-ton shotgun warhead can carry up to 5K-10K variosuly sized, weighted, shaped, super-hardened, tungsten alloy pellets, weighing from 10g to 1kg. Released from very high altitude, it can be scattered within a circle with a radius less than 500 meters with a hyper speed of 6-10 Machs. With a salvo of 5-10 DF-26s, thousands of these super-heated, super-energized pellets will hit the target aircraft carrier simultaneously. It will immediately render the whole aircraft carrier into a smoldering, burning, exploding wreck! All the aircrafts/equipments/bombs/fuel/people on the deck will all be damaged, destroyed, injured, or killed. There will be thousands of large and small pot holes on the flight deck and leaving it completely unusable for an indefinitely long period of time (2, 3, 5 years or never!). The extremely highly-energized, heavier pellets will penetrate all the way from the top of the flight deck to the bottom of the ship, leaving everything in its path destroyed! What are you going to use to shoot down all these thousands of killer pellets raining down on your head?
An EMP warhead used alone, or together with the shotgun warhead simultaneously, will render all the enemy warships radar completely cooked and shorted. Without radar, ABM systems simply become non-existent and leave the whole fleet at the mercy of its enemy. After the first-wave shotgun-warhead and EMP-warhead attacks, the enemy's fleet simply become defenseless, and then the conventional single-warhead, MIRV attacks will follow to further the destruction. Any of the remaining unfinished jobs after the DF salvos can be left to the submarines, destroyers, frigates, or even the 022s to finish!
Still entangled with the conventional thinking of hitting a bullet with a bullet, almost all of our Chinese compatriots and probably all of the Americans still haven't fully realized the earth-shaking implications of the birth of an unstoppable array of DF-21Ds and DF-26s. With a simple change of the lower-stage booster rocket engines, same ASBM warheads can be fitted on DF-31( 8,000km), DF-31A (12,000km), DF-5B (14,000+ km), this simply implies that there is NO place to hide for the US Navy any more! Adding the hyper-velocity glider warheads to avoid any mid-course interceptions, you can start to sense the kind of helpless feeling the US Navy will have once they have fully understood what is happening right now from China. So far, they haven't waken up yet. But soon they will!
