Arguably, the root cause is just that the marginal economics of antiship missile defense are now unfavorable (historically the idea was that you would shoot dow

Arguably, the root cause is just that the marginal economics of antiship missile defense are now unfavorable (historically the idea was that you would shoot down the planes carrying them and deny targeting, but that's not very realistic now). That's not a problem against traditional opponents, but against an economic peer, it means you have great pressure in your quantity of antiship defences. The problem is that for every VLS cell the US can float, the Chinese can build 4-5 more missiles, so the problem will remain.