Defense One:
As “great power competition” becomes the lingua franca of American strategy, U.S. policymakers and analysts must build a greater familiarity with the Chinese strategic systems that increasingly worry combatant commanders and which would play an essential role in any Indo-Pacific crisis.
The situation is analogous to the Cold War, when knowledge of Soviet ICBMs was not limited to Sovietologists. Yet unlike in the last century, an extensive amount of information about these systems lies in the open to be analyzed. Instead of awaiting Moscow May Day parades, we can glean a great deal about the systems and their deployments through everything from official announcements to social-media tracking to unit commanders’ bios.
Since 2017, the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, the service responsible for China’s conventional and nuclear missiles, has added 10 brigades — more than a one-third increase — and deployed an array of formidable new weapons. These new systems include the intermediate-range DF-26 ballistic missile, DF-31AG and DF-41 intercontinental ballistic missiles, CJ-100 cruise missile, and DF-17 hypersonic glide vehicle. A new nuclear-armed DF-21 variant, speculatively referred to as the DF-21E, may have also been deployed but has not yet been officially unveiled.
We know the most about the DF-26, which is thought to be able to strike ground and naval targets out to about 4,000 kilometers. Publicly revealed in 2015, this IRBM has quickly become one of the PLARF’s most widely deployed systems, equipping at least five brigades so far. These brigades are widely geographically dispersed, with one each in northwest, northeast, and central China, and two more in the southeast, indicating the centrality of the DF-26 to a wide variety of theaters and missions. The DoD has reported both that the PLARF already possesses around 200 DF-26 launchers – a shockingly high figure – and that China continues to manufacture new ones. Hence, it is likely that the number of DF-26 brigades is set to grow still further…
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