A report on China’s ballistic missiles and hypersonic weaponry by Pentagon revealed that the new DF-27 ICBM with a hypersonic glide vehicle can hit ships too.
The 2025 report by Pentagon, titled “Report to Congress on Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China 2025”, covering developments in China’s military capabilities, stated that China’s new DF-27 ICBM with a hypersonic glide vehicle doubles as an anti-ship ballistic missile in a different configuration or the base configuration.
DF-27 is estimated to reach a range between 5000 km and 8000 km, effectively putting it in the ICBM class.
This marks DF-27 as the fourth anti-ship ballistic missile in China after the DF-26 IRBM, YJ-17 HGV-fitted ballistic missile, and DF-21D MRBM. Considering the fact that the DF-17 HGV-fitted ballistic missile was developed into the YJ-17 for launch from naval platforms and anti-surface warfare, it is likely that a variant of DF-27 as YJ-27 would be put in service as an intercontinental anti-ship ballistic missile.
Provided there is a chain of sensors feeding constant updates of target location, an anti-ship ballistic missile of long range using a hypersonic glide vehicle evades an important shortcoming of a conventional anti-ship ballistic missile: stiffness of trajectory. Due to the hypersonic gliders being capable of performing far sharper manoeuvres compared to a multi-ton ballistic missile, adjustments during guidance are easier to account for the target ship’s movement.
On the other hand, high agility and altitude of hypersonic gliders allow for better chances of evading normal air defence missiles, which has led to the development of purpose-built interceptors against gliders to work at high altitudes efficiently.
One key weakness of hypersonic gliders is that they start to lose speed rapidly upon their terminal approach, specifically in the troposphere, due to the air density rapidly increasing. What mostly solves this problem is, as one could guess, hypersonic cruise missiles with sustained propulsion provided by scramjets.
Author: Kaan Azman
Editor: Özgür Ekşi
