Been watching this progress over the past year as they built the island up. The 10,000 runway at Fiery Cross Reef has accepted its first aircraft…deemed a “civil” aircraft testing the infrastructure. Going to be interesting to see what military aircraft they base out there to help with their Coast Guard duties and fishery research…LOL…
BeachAV8R
One strategy to combat this is to get a couple of Nimitz class’s to do continuous hard donut turns a couple of miles off-shore - in the name of freedom of navigation of course. The wake will wash all that sand away within days. 
JDAM solves all ailments.
A few B-1s full of those and behold, your island has become an atoll.
Every carrier CO who came from the fighter community has already been prepping their crews for just such a mission.
Global warming is already on the job there… they will need to load up some more sand in a few years with the ocean levels rising… kinda like Richmond
Passenger jets because it looks like such a nice vacation spot? 
They aren’t passenger jets…
Now…thar be missiles! (different island I think though…)
Missiles are cool…
No arguments here.
It was tracking like a Vikhr there for a bit…!
Apparently it was like a reverse Vikhr. Instead of three non, and one functional maneuver fin, it had three functional and one non functional maneuvering fin.
Obviously this requires more testing.
Not sure I would want to be in the launcher and look up and see the rocket I just launched doing donuts above my head…
It could be worse. You could look up and see the missile you just launched on top of your vehicle.
well doesn’t the fuze of those missiles arm by G-force? by acceleration? I remember it being an issue under some fanatic groups that when their RPG-7 misfired. instead of calmy taking it out and disposing of it safely they took it out in a panic and threw it away as far as they could. Leading to all sort of unpleasantries.
So the missile should be safe, although I wouldn’t take any chances with something that big 
Cool map of Chinese Detection/Defense ranges with their newly constructed islands…putting the “China” in South China Sea for sure…
BeachAV8R
That is a very neat and impressive project!
What I’ve read about those S-300 failures is, is that they are designed to be stored without maintenance and a percentage of them are expected to fail on launch as has been demonstrated in those movies. Really it’s the russian bang for buck method as seen with the Vikhr missile.
Besides, the Patriot system also wasn’t very effective for the longest time, given it didn’t explode on launch as much for all we know.
