Top-secret documents leaked online in recent weeks reveal China has deployed an intermediate-range hypersonic missile that can hit targets thousands of miles away and has a “high probability” of penetrating US defenses, according to a report.
The chilling assessment of the enhanced strike capabilities of Beijing’s People’s Liberation Army is in one of a slew of confidential Pentagon papers uploaded to online message boards since late last year, federal investigators say.
The documents have also revealed US intelligence about the strength of Russia’s military, indicated plans for Ukraine’s spring counterattack, and detailed intelligence gathered about US allies.
The FBI arrested Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman from Massachusetts, on Thursday for allegedly leaking the trove of sensitive information to members of a private Discord chat group. He was formally charged in Boston federal court Friday.
Among the documents was a Feb. 28 top-secret report compiled by the Joint Chiefs of Staff intelligence directorate that detailed China’s successful test launch of an advanced intermediate-range DF-27 hypersonic glide missile a few days earlier, the Washington Post reported.
“The DF-27 is designed to enhance [China’s] ability to hold targets at risk beyond the Second Island Chain and possesses a high probability of penetrating” US ballistic missile defense, the report concluded, according to the newspaper.
The rocket flew for 12 minutes and traveled 1,300 miles, the leaked document said.
But the Washington Post pointed out that a 2021 Defense Department report estimated that the DF-27 has a range of up to 8,000 kilometers, or nearly 5,000 miles, putting it within striking distance of most of the Pacific, including the US territory of Guam.
The hypersonic glide power allows the missile to be easily maneuvered to evade defense systems.
Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin wrote on Thursday that China could take advantage of that capability in a potential invasion of Taiwan.
“If American ships can be held at bay and US forces in Asia can be targeted at will, any allied intervention in Taiwan’s defense would be more difficult and costly,” Rogin wrote.
Beyond the development of the DF-27, China is expanding its arsenal as it becomes more aggressive militarily in the South China Sea, launching an improved aircraft carrier, seeking to secure a military outpost in the Pacific, and accelerating the expansion of its nuclear weapons program.
In March, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) said Beijing is constructing roughly 350 new nuclear-missile silos, hundreds of nuclear warheads and bases for mobile missile launchers.
“China is continuing the nuclear weapons modernization program that it initiated in the 1990s and 2000s, but is expanding it significantly by fielding more types and greater numbers of nuclear weapons than ever before,” the report said.
The news outlet also said that military planners in Washington have realized that China has moved beyond the US in hypersonic missile technology, and while the US has its own hypersonic weapons it “lacks sufficient means to defend against the ones China is already fielding.”