China’s military will field 60 advanced nuclear-capable missiles by 2035 that can evade early warnings and missile defense systems.
A Defense Intelligence Agency assessment ordered by President Trump as part of his “Golden Dome” initiative revealed that China is a developing a troubling new missile capability that can used to strike U.S. targets, evading existing early detection and other missile defenses.
Trump is pushing for the construction of an advanced, new homeland missile defense framework. During his joint session speech to Congress this year, Trump said of the Golden Dome project: “It’s very important. This is a very dangerous world. We should have it. We want to be protected.”
China’s military will field 60 advanced nuclear-capable missiles by 2035 that can evade early warnings and missile defense systems, the Defense Intelligence Agency revealed in its missile defense assessment, released Tuesday.
Today, it is not estimated to have any of those missiles. But the agency predicts that Beijing will have those missiles, which operate as part of what’s known as a Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS), by 2035.
In its annual report on Chinese military capabilities last year, the Pentagon said that the Chinese government has demonstrated its likely ability to field a FOBS and that this could “facilitate difficult to track attacks on the U.S. homeland.”
“The era of denial and wishing for the best from the PLA has finally ended,” said Jacqueline Deal, non-resident senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a Chinese military analyst, told National Review.
“DIA’s transparency is commendable. This threat is why President Trump issued his Iron Dome Executive Order within a week of being inaugurated. We are building out a national missile defense system to protect the country, including capabilities in space, and we are contributing to our allies’ missile defense capabilities.”
China can already hit the continental United States with intercontinental ballistic missiles. The DIA report found that Beijing possesses 400 of those missiles, which are typically armed with nuclear warheads. “There is no part of the homeland which cannot be struck by existing ICBMs,” the assessment states. It also revealed that China will have 700 of them by 2035 and said that ICBMs “will remain the primary threat to the homeland.”
What alarms defense officials about FOBS, though, is that system’s likely ability to bypass existing defenses by flying over the South Pole. DIA also expects Russia to possess fewer than 12 FOBS by 2035.
FOBS is an intercontinental ballistic missile that has a much shorter flight time, as it reaches low earth orbit and does not hit the same altitude.
The People’s Liberation Army tested a hypersonic glide vehicle — a maneuverable device that delivers ballistic missiles at hypersonic speed — in July 2021, the Pentagon said in its 2024 China military power report. That test demonstrated China’s likely ability to field FOBS, the report said.
The DIA assessment this week found that China will field 4,000 boosted hypersonic weapons, including glide vehicles, by 2035, and that Beijing currently possesses 600 of them.
A Financial Times report that revealed the Chinese missile test the same year sparked alarm in Washington and spurred discussion about a new “Sputnik moment.”
Mitch Kugler, a former Raytheon vice president and senate staffer who worked on the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative, said that the new capabilities highlighted in the report increase the difficulties for existing missile defense systems.
“Space-based interceptors is a must,” Kugler told National Review, adding that they should be able to target missiles on the way up, not just the boost phase. Kugler views space-based interceptors as one additional layer that improves the effectiveness of the rest of the system and that Golden Dome must focus additional funds on them.
Kugler added that the Pentagon needs to bypass the traditionally slow acquisitions process and turn to smaller defense contractors to get interceptors into space quickly, even if they only cover 70 percent of the desired capability initially. “We should be able to get the first few hundred SBIs up under this method within two years, and that should be the objective.”
“This is our shot to deploy the initial space-based interceptors layer, and we can’t allow anything to get in the way of that.”