According to the military publication The National Interest, Beijing has about 100,000 mines ready to be deployed immediately to avoid the intervention of the United States and its allies in a military conflict that Washington sees as inevitable.
These mines are one of the four key components of the strategy baptized by the Asian military as the ‘Assassin’s Mace’, a set of strategies to deny access and control of the area, countering the naval forces of the United States and its allies. .
The report states that the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has been testing the deployment of these devices designed to eliminate ships and submarines with the aim of creating uncertainty by establishing a perimeter of danger for the North American military. The scale of the deployment of these mines is, according to experts, “substantial.”
The “Assassin’s Hammer” strategy is designed to achieve access/area denial (A2/AD) along with weapons such as hypersonic ‘naval group killer’ gliders and long-range anti-aircraft batteries. With these threats, China intends to prevent its adversaries from approaching or operating freely in areas critical to its security and expansion plans.
