The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) may have operationally fielded its DF-27, a rare Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) with anti-ship capability, that could seriously threaten the United States in the event of a conflict.
The Pentagon’s 2025 Annual Report on Military and Security Developments involving the People’s Republic of China, released December 23, states that the DF-27 can strike land and maritime targets between 5,000 and 8,000 kilometres away.
The DF-27’s capabilities were officially confirmed for the first time in a graphic showing the PLA’s fielded conventional strike capability. This means the DF-27 could easily destroy targets as far away as Hawaii or Alaska, as well as in the contiguous United States (CONUS).
With the DF-27, the Chinese military would have the capability to cover nearly the entire Indo-Pacific and strike US Pacific frontline territories that could potentially be used as a launchpad for carrying out attacks against Beijing in case of a conflict.
Additionally, the missile also has the range to target critical military bases in Australia, a key US ally in the South Pacific that could hypothetically assist Washington in its war.
The Pentagon assessment states that the deployment of this first-of-its-kind anti-ship missile system would enable China to attack US Navy vessels at ranges beyond those of its existing cruise, supersonic, and hypersonic missiles. However, its range is shorter than that of other ICBMs, such as the DF-41, which is designed for nuclear attack.
The operational deployment of the DF-27 is expected to be a major concern for the United States, particularly given the threat of a conflict with China, which is virtually never off the table.
In fact, amid fears that China could invade Taiwan by 2027, military analysts predict a possible US-China clash in the Indo-Pacific.
What Do We Know About The DF-27?
The DF-27 remains a closely guarded secret of the Chinese military, one that was not unveiled at the grand Victory Day Parade in September 2025, where several previously unknown weapon systems debuted. Whatever information we have about the DF-27 comes from leaked intelligence and Pentagon assessments.
The existence of this missile was first disclosed in the Pentagon’s 2021 China Military Power Report, which described it as a “long-range” weapon under development.
Later, in 2023, the Washington Post reported that Beijing conducted a test with its latest advanced experimental missile, the DF-27 ICBM, on February 25, 2023. The report was purportedly based on a leaked classified Pentagon document that stated the vehicle flew for 12 minutes over 2,100 kilometers and had a “high probability” of breaching American ballistic missile defense systems.
Subsequently, the Pentagon’s 2024 China Military report claimed that the DF-27 had been “deployed” to the Rocket Force. It stated that the missile might have the optional Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV), as well as “conventional land-attack, conventional anti-ship, and nuclear capabilities.”
However, the recently published 2025 report did not put the missile under the “fielded nuclear capability” category, confirming its sole conventional-attack role.
Talking about the DF-27 last week, Andrew Erickson, a professor at the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute said, “China became the first to field an analogous capability: a conventional ICBM—with an ASBM variant—that can conduct rapid, long-range precision strikes out to intercontinental distances, including against its ‘strong enemy’s’ homeland and its naval forces at sea.”
It is pertinent to note that if the DF-27 comes with a Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV), it would be much harder for American air defenses to intercept.
Unlike traditional ballistic missiles, which typically follow a predictable parabolic arc, HGVs glide and maneuver throughout much of their flight, including the midcourse and terminal phases, changing direction significantly. This makes the trajectory prediction and interception extremely difficult.
In fact, the use of DF-27 could make heavy naval vessels like destroyers, upcoming battleships, and aircraft carriers sitting ducks.
The present US Navy defenses are mainly designed to bring down drones, bombs, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. It is currently advancing work on counter-hypersonic systems, but does not yet field an air defense system designed solely to take down highly hypersonic threats.
The SM-6 missile has proven effective against high-speed maneuvering threats, including some hypersonic profiles, but the highly maneuverable hypersonic weapons can evade even the most advanced defensive systems.
Besides posing a massive threat to China’s adversaries, the fielding of the DF-27 further solidifies China’s position as the world leader in hypersonic technology.
How Does DF-27 Threaten The US?
Despite not having comparable capabilities, both the US and Russia have been working to develop new intermediate-range weapons since the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty collapsed in 2019 after the US withdrew from it, accusing Russia of non-compliance.
The integration of the DF-27 greatly expands China’s long-range maritime strike capability and area-denial strategy. It may be a part of PLA’s efforts to develop potent anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities in conjunction with its other “aircraft carrier killers,” such as ground-based DF-21D and DF-26B ballistic missiles, or air-launched KD-21 and sea-launched YJ-20 and YJ-21, to prevent foreign powers, primarily the US, from impeding a possible military campaign against Taiwan.
“Like China’s shorter-range DF-17 and DF-21 medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs), and DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), the DF-27 ICBM has both land-attack and anti-ship targeting capabilities. Anti-ship targeting capabilities make at least one variant of each of these ballistic missiles an ASBM,” Dr. Andrew Erickson stated.
In case of a conflict in the region, these missiles can give the PLA a “home advantage” and prevent hostile navies from entering disputed waters along China’s coast. If the US and its allies were to enter the conflict in support of Taiwan, the missile could be used to strike targets in the First Island Chain and pose a special irritant to the US Navy carriers and warships traversing the Western Pacific waters.
China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has developed one of the world’s most advanced and diverse anti-ship arsenals, primarily focused on anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) strategies to deter or defeat naval interventions, particularly by US carrier strike groups in the Indo-Pacific. China emphasises hypersonic weapons for evasion of defences.
In his own capacity, Dr. Andrew Erickson told USNI News that the DF-27’s potential was one of the most important findings in this year’s Pentagon China military power report because it illustrates the ramifications for US forces in the Indo-Pacific.
“Taken together, China’s ASBMs — now potentially extending to intercontinental ranges with the DF-27 — pose a potent threat to surface ships across much of the Pacific. In effect, they constitute a new form of naval force,” Erickson told the publication.
Explaining how the fielding of this missile changes the naval balance between China and the United States, Erickson said, “Although the United States and its allies possess manifold countermeasures in what would be a complex systems-of-systems contest, there is no denying that, by becoming the first major ASBM power and steadily expanding its ASBM families, China has dramatically changed the naval balance and the prospective ways of war in the Western Pacific and beyond.”
The confirmation of DF-27’s fielding, as well as other potent carrier-killer missiles, comes days after a Pentagon think tank report that warned that Chinese hypersonic missiles could sink carriers “within minutes” was leaked.
The report recommended investing in low-cost, unmanned systems rather than in heavy, complex, and expensive aircraft carriers.
