“Nowadays, there are a lot of countries and companies that have the ability to send vehicles down to the sea floor and have them manipulate, install or take away undersea cables,” said Bryan Clark, a retired naval submariner and former Navy strategist who is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank

As a result, there are signs that U.S. strategic thinkers have given significant thought to the problems that Woody Island might pose in a potential military conflict with China, and how to neutralize it. A major fleet architecture study conducted earlier this year by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analysis for the U.S. Congress used an unlabeled graphic of Woody Island to illustrate new concepts for conducting amphibious raids against fortified archipelagos.

A May 2016 report from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment found that large caliber guns could fire an HVP between 10 and 30 nautical miles at Mach 3, faster than conventional unguided rounds. 

Bryan Clark, a retired U.S. Navy undersea warfare officer and analyst the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, suggested that while the requisite missile ejection technologies are difficult to master, it is probably not beyond the capabilities of North Korean engineers.

The research concluded that Russia’s and China’s sophisticated long-range sensor and weapon networks along their borders and in occupied lands create a “strategic problem” for the United States, said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments who participated in the wargame.

Former Air Force pilot Mark Gunzinger and Bryan Clark of the Center of Strategic and Budgetary Assessment wrote in a 2015 report, “96% of all American Precision Guided Munitions (PGM) are direct attack weapons with ranges under 50 nm.”