The Startling Mystery Of China’s Suddenly-Appearing Carrier-Killer Missiles

The DF-26 is China’s go-to killer rocket. The 42-foot-long missile, which launches from a road-mobile transporter-erector-launcher, or TEL, can carry a two-ton warhead — conventional or nuclear — as far as 2,500 miles.

DF-26s blasting off from bases in mainland China could pummel Taiwanese airfields in the hours before a Chinese invasion force crosses the Taiwan Strait. If Beijing made a play for some disputed island in the China Seas, it could try to slow an American response by lobbing DF-26s at the U.S. Air Force bomber base in Guam.

All that is to say, it matters how many DF-26s China has. Too bad the Pentagon apparently sucks at counting them.

People’s Republic of China leaders years ago decided that rockets were a cheap and easy way to quickly close the gap between Chinese and American firepower in the western Pacific. “The PRC’s robust ground-based conventional missile forces compliment the growing size and capabilities of its air- and sea-based precision-strike capabilities,” the U.S. Defense Department stated in its report Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2020.

The DF-26 isn’t the only conventional rocket in the arsenal of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force. There are the DF-11, DF-15 and DF-16 short-range ballistic missiles, the DF-21 medium-range ballistic missile and the DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile. 

While China would aim most of its rockets at targets on land, the DF-21D and the DF-26 in theory are capable of hitting ships at sea. “Carrier-killers,” the Americans call them.

The DF-26, which first appeared in 2015 and entered service in 2016, arguably is the most fearsome of the rockets. But how many of the PLARF’s roughly 1,300 rockets are DF-26s?

In 2018 there were no more than 30 DF-26 TELs in the PLARF, according to Ankit Panda, a missile expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. A year later there were 80 in a total of around four brigades, each with its own base, vehicles and personnel. 

Now here’s a shocker. According to the Pentagon’s 2020 report, there are now 200 DF-26s in PLARF service. Meaning the rocket force more than doubled its DF-26 infrastructure in a year. Panda called that number the “biggest surprise” in Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2020.

Experts are skeptical. “I cannot see how they could suddenly deploy six additional DF-26 [brigades] in a year’s time,” tweeted Decker Eveleth, a fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in California. Each brigade requires scores of heavy vehicles and hundreds of missileers, to say nothing of facilities to live in, operate from and hide in during wartime.

If the PLARF somehow did double the DF-26 force in 12 months, U.S. policymakers should worry, Panda tweeted. But there’s no sign of concern inside the administration of Pres. Donald Trump. “You’d think the administration would have made more noise about China’s rapid deployment of DF-26 brigades given everything else they complain about,” Panda tweeted.

It’s more likely the Defense Department got it wrong. It’s likely the PLARF added DF-26s since 2019. It’s unlikely it added six brigades.

If that’s the case, it would represent at least the second major flaw in Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2020. The report also omits Taiwan’s own long-range missile from its comparison of Chinese and Taiwanese forces.