China’s missile arsenal may soon rival the US. Here are the leading missiles it’s stockpiling for a big fight.

Hypersonic glide vehicle

China is ahead of Russia and the US in the race to develop hypersonic weapons.

Air defenses project a missile’s flight path and fire interceptors to hit it on that track. But this new class of weapons is designed to defeat them by flying an erratic path after the missile re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere.

A US senior defense analyst said China has the world’s “leading hypersonic arsenal,” which includes the medium-range Dong Feng-17 ballistic missile equipped with a hypersonic glide vehicle.

In service since 2019, the road-mobile missile can be armed with conventional or nuclear warheads. US intelligence estimated that, when equipped with a hypersonic warhead, the DF-17 can reach speeds of Mach 5 to 10 and have a range of up to 1,550 miles.

The missile is key to China’s efforts to deter US intervention in the Asia-Pacific region, and claims that an anti-ship variant is in development.

Meanwhile, the US is still scrambling to field its own hypersonic missile, conducting its first hypersonic weapon test with a hypersonic cruise missile in the Pacific earlier this year.

“Of course, one US test won’t shift China’s hypersonic trajectory, nor will it resolve serious concerns regarding China’s perceived hypersonic edge,” Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told CNN. “But it reaffirms that the US is not just an observer in the hypersonic domain, it’s a formidable player, and one committed to matching pace with China and Russia.”

The US also partnered with Japan, a vital ally in the Pacific, to develop a defense system to counter China’s hypersonic weapons.