Why China seeks more reach beyond the first island chain

The first two Chinese carriers can contribute to operations in the South and East China Seas when backed by land-based aviation and island facilities. Increasingly large exercises around Taiwan create a hypothetical warning problem because one might cease to be an exercise, complicating the defender's ability to identify the transition to attack. Any real operation would contain failures as well as successes, so the capacity to absorb reverses and operate toward the second island chain matters. Operating farther away, particularly with the resilience needed for a major conflict, demands larger and more capable forces. Carriers could act as forward coordinating nodes in a wider combined strike system designed to present multiple threats at similar times. Admiral Sergei Gorshkov's Soviet concept of a combined mass attack used missiles and other weapons from several units and directions. Matching arrival times is intended to divide defensive attention, create leakers, and make each following strike harder to stop as damage accumulates.