Iran Seeks Chinese CM-302 Supersonic Anti-Ship Missiles to Challenge U.S. Navy in Persian Gulf.

Iran is reportedly negotiating to acquire China’s CM-302 supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, a move that could significantly increase risks to U.S. naval forces operating in the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman. If confirmed, the deal would strengthen Tehran’s anti-access strategy by adding a high-speed sea-skimming weapon designed to compress ship defense reaction times and complicate U.S. maritime operations.

Iran is moving toward acquiring China’s CM-302 supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, a step that would materially tighten Tehran’s ability to hold U.S. naval forces at risk across the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman while raising the stakes for commercial shipping in the region’s chokepoints, according to Reuters. The reported transaction signals more than a marginal inventory upgrade. If it proceeds, it would add a modern, high-speed sea-skimming weapon to Iran’s layered coastal defense architecture, compressing reaction time for ship self-defense systems and strengthening Tehran’s broader anti-access strategy designed to deter U.S. intervention and shape escalation dynamics at sea. Reuters reported the prospective deal, citing multiple people familiar with the talks, while noting it has not been officially confirmed by Tehran or Beijing.
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Iran is reportedly seeking China's CM-302 supersonic anti-ship missiles to strengthen its coastal anti-access capabilities, a move that could significantly increase the threat to U.S. naval forces and commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf amid rising regional tensions (Picture source: Chinese Internet).

The report lands amid a renewed cycle of U.S.-Iran friction in which maritime pressure is a central instrument. U.S. carrier strike group movements and regional deployments are routinely used to signal resolve, while Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy has historically leaned on a mix of fast attack craft, drones, coastal missiles, and mines to threaten sea lines of communication without matching U.S. blue-water capacity ship-for-ship. A supersonic anti-ship missile purchase fits that playbook: it is a comparatively economical way to impose risk on capital ships and high-value auxiliaries that underpin U.S. operational endurance. The talks are also reported to have accelerated after a short Iran-Israel war that reportedly strained parts of Iran’s missile arsenal, adding an urgency factor to replenishment and modernization efforts.

The CM-302 is marketed as an export-oriented supersonic anti-ship cruise missile associated with the YJ-12 family, a Chinese design class built around speed, sea-skimming terminal flight, and penetration tactics intended to complicate interception. Open-source profiles describe the CM-302’s export range as roughly 290 km, a figure consistent with typical export caps intended to align with the Missile Technology Control Regime threshold. The weapon is described as carrying a 250 kg-class warhead and approaching targets in a sea-skimming profile, with terminal maneuvering intended to break fire-control solutions and stress close-in defenses. In practical naval terms, the combination of supersonic speed and low altitude reduces the defender’s engagement window, forcing earlier detection, faster track quality generation, and rapid layered engagements using long-range surface-to-air missiles, point-defense interceptors, and close-in weapon systems.

While specific seeker and guidance details for the CM-302 are not formally published in a way that can be independently verified from official datasheets, the closely related YJ-12 family is assessed to use inertial navigation augmented by satellite navigation for midcourse flight, with active radar homing in the terminal phase and plausible midcourse update pathways. That architecture matters operationally because the missile’s lethality is not only a function of speed and warhead weight, but also the quality of the kill chain that feeds it: wide-area maritime surveillance, target classification, and continuous cueing in cluttered littoral environments. Iran has invested heavily in coastal radars, UAV reconnaissance, signals intelligence, and dispersed launch units precisely to sustain that kill chain under pressure. Analysts have long noted that Iran’s sea-air-missile complex is designed to generate cumulative risk through numbers, geography, and ambiguity rather than through a single exquisite capability.

A CM-302-class weapon would therefore be most consequential when integrated into Iran’s existing doctrine of saturation and multi-axis attack. A likely tactical model is a blended strike: subsonic missiles and drones forcing radar workload and ammunition expenditure, followed by supersonic sea-skimmers that arrive with minimal warning at the terminal stage. Even advanced Aegis-equipped ships can be stressed when forced to manage dense tracks at short timelines, especially if threats approach from multiple bearings and altitudes. In the Gulf’s constrained waters, geography further favors the attacker: coastal launch sites, islands, and civilian traffic can complicate discrimination and allow launch units to shoot and relocate from concealed positions.

The development lineage also helps explain why Iran would look to China even while it continues expanding domestic missile programs. China began developing the YJ-12 class in the 1990s and fielded it in later decades as an air-launched and ship-launched anti-ship cruise missile emphasizing high speed and terminal penetration. Export variants like CM-302 offer partners a shortcut to mature propulsion and guidance packages that are difficult to replicate quickly under sanctions pressure. For Tehran, this is less about replacing indigenous systems than about diversifying the threat set. Iran already fields multiple anti-ship families derived from older Chinese designs and domestic evolutions, and it has showcased longer-range anti-ship cruise missile concepts in recent years. The added value of CM-302 is its supersonic endgame, which threatens to punch through defenses that were optimized for slower subsonic sea-skimmers.

The reported negotiations also sit inside a broader Iran-China security convergence that has steadily thickened despite the U.S. sanctions architecture. Beijing’s interest is not necessarily in enabling a conflict, but in shaping the regional balance in ways that constrain U.S. freedom of maneuver and protect China’s energy and trade equities. Iran’s interest is direct: if Tehran can credibly threaten high-end U.S. naval assets and the maritime economy that depends on Gulf transit, it gains coercive leverage in crises and potentially greater room to maneuver in nuclear and regional diplomacy. Chinese, Iranian, and Russian naval interactions and political alignment form part of the background to the potential transfer, even as official confirmation remains absent.

There is also an industry and proliferation dimension. A transfer of a modern supersonic anti-ship missile into Iran’s inventory would sharpen concerns about secondary proliferation to aligned non-state actors, even if the CM-302 itself is retained under tighter state control. It would also reinforce a trend in which the most operationally relevant maritime strike improvements come not from new hulls, but from missiles, sensors, and networks that can be dispersed, hidden, and rapidly employed. For U.S. planners, the implication is a heavier demand for persistent ISR, electronic warfare, magazine depth in defensive interceptors, and preemptive options against mobile coastal batteries.

For now, the key point is that the report remains unconfirmed, and there has been no public endorsement by the governments involved. But even the prospect of CM-302 acquisition is operationally meaningful because it highlights where the maritime competition is heading: toward faster, harder-to-stop salvos designed to exploit geography and compress decision cycles. In a Gulf theater where minutes can decide whether escalation is contained or compounded, supersonic sea-skimming anti-ship missiles are not simply another munition.