By Rebecca L. Grant, Ph.D., Vice President, Lexington Institute.

September 9, 2025 

The full text of this article is available below and on the National Security Journal website here.

Key Points and Summary – Despite its massive size and impressive parades, China’s People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) may be a “paper tiger” in a real conflict.

The PLARF’s effectiveness is severely undermined by deep-rooted corruption, a complete lack of modern combat experience, and finite missile stockpiles.

While China boasts of “carrier-killer” missiles like the DF-21D, the immense difficulty of targeting and hitting a moving, well-defended U.S. aircraft carrier is a major operational challenge.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is deploying advanced counter-hypersonic defenses, stretching China’s limited resources and diminishing the PLARF’s perceived threat.

The PLARF May Be A “Paper Tiger”

Painted with white English-letter designators, the canisters of China’s DF-5C rolled down the streets of Beijing, alongside other missiles, to showcase the power of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF).

The PLARF is now the largest ground-based missile force in the world, with about 2,500 ballistic missiles of all types, nuclear and conventional. The PLARF became a separate branch of China’s military in 2015, making it equivalent to the Navy, Army and Air Force. It owns and operates most of China’s newer missiles and reports directly to the Central Military Commission headed by Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Top U.S. military commanders said they were not concerned.

“The takeaway for this is we are not deterred,” said Air Force Gen. Kevin Schneider, the commander of U.S. Air Forces Pacific. According to Schneider, the future B-21 stealth bomber, F-47 fighter, Collaborative Combat Aircraft, and other systems will allow the U.S. to “adapt ahead of what a potential adversary is doing.”

Despite the formidable build-up, the PLARF’s capabilities may not match its ambitions.

China’s PLARF, while a serious menace, is also beset by corruption and operational problems that could render the missile force far less effective than advertised.

A Paper Tiger?

Call it a “paper tiger.” That term was coined by Mao Zedong in a 1946 interview and became a staple of 1950s disputes over the Taiwan Strait. The paper tiger is depicted as “snarling bravely enough but in the end backing away from a fight” as the New York Times explained in 1955.

For starters, China’s most recent combat experience was during its 1979 clash with Vietnam. It is impossible to know how effective the PLARF would be in sustained, joint operations under attack – the service has no experience with this. Meanwhile, corruption problems “could present real obstacles to accomplishing the goals that Xi has set for the PLA for 2027,” former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Chase said during a forum hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The effectiveness of China’s missiles may also be diminished by its own doctrine. Limited shot opportunities, targeting difficulties, and the need to cover a wide range of targets – from U.S. forces to Indian nuclear sites – complicate the PLARF’s mission.

For example, China boasts of its so-called carrier-killer missiles, such as the DF-21D and DF-26. The DF-21D anti-ship missile variant was deployed in 2006 as a modification of the DF-21, which has been in service with China since 1991. It has a range of 2,150 kilometers and can carry a nuclear warhead, but its main payload is a 600-kilogram conventional warhead. The DF-26 is a two-stage, solid-fueled intermediate-range ballistic missile with a range of 4,000 km and active seekers for terminal guidance. The PLARF fired an anti-ship DF-26B in the South China Sea in August 2020. The DF-26 extends the range of Chinese precision strike closer to the Second Island Chain.

Yet the PLARF faces formidable obstacles if it tries to find, fix, track, target, and strike an aircraft carrier. This is not an easy targeting solution. Carriers mask their presence with emissions control, and a U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier can move anywhere within a 700-square-mile area in approximately 30 minutes. That presents a major challenge to the accurate firing of any missile. Next, PLARF missiles would also have to get through a cordon of sea-based missile defenses. A near-miss is not good enough. The USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) experienced three 40,000-lb. underwater blasts with live ordnance as part of the ship’s Full Scale Shock Trials in a simulated combat environment; the final blast was less than 75 yards from the carrier. Note that the quantity of ordnance was equal, by weight, to the warheads on 30 of China’s DF-21 missiles.

Defenses Are Coming

To counter some of China’s deadliest new weapons, the U.S. is accelerating development of counter-hypersonic missile defenses all along the kill chain. Space-based tracking and upgraded Aegis systems, paired with the SM-6 missile, are establishing a baseline capability to defeat hypersonic attacks.

“We will build everything from interceptors to capabilities that can confuse and blind the Chinese targeting sensors,” said Sen. Roger Wicker, (R-Miss).

In the March 2025 “Stellar Banshee” test run by the Missile Defense Agency, the destroyer USS Pinkney (DDG-91) demonstrated the ability to detect, track, and engage a simulated advanced hypersonic target using the Sea Based Terminal Increment 3 capability embedded in the latest Aegis software.

The Hypersonic and Ballistic Track and Surveillance System (HBTSS) uses a new constellation of satellites in low Earth orbit, cued to use a medium field-of view, to track the hypersonic weapon even as it maneuvers. The U.S. Space Force has prototype satellites conducting air moving target indicator tracking. A full constellation of these satellites would be able to hand off a target continuously as it moved. The Missile Defense Agency confirmed in April 2025 that the HBTSS was meeting expected performance in tests.

Other Problems

Increasing missile-intercept rates are a big problem for China. The Chinese rocket force does not have an unlimited supply of missiles. Overall, “although the PLARF is large, China does not possess vast stockpiles of missiles; in a protracted conflict, the utility of the PLARF will diminish rapidly,” a U.S. Army study found.

No PLARF commander can afford to expend too many missiles on a target when the probability of a kill is not good. As the same Army study noted, “deception operations to fool the Chinese into striking false targets will yield immense benefits, because as noted above, the PLARF has a very limited reserve of missiles to draw from, and thus every wasted missile offers significant ability to degrade PLARF capabilities.”

China would therefore have a hard time prioritizing and allocating missiles to cover a growing set of land-based targets, such as U.S. and allied surface-to-air missile sites. Further, PLA documents hint at a desire to reserve missiles for the vague but alarming task of attaining “international strategic effects by striking critical nodes of the global economy during a future conflict,” as the 2024 DoD China Military Power report phrased it.

Nor is the U.S. China’s only potential adversary. Despite Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Beijing, it’s likely some PLARF forces are allocated for deterrence against India, especially since the 2024test of a Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle system on the Agni-V missile.

The PLARF may or may not be a “paper tiger.” But in a significant Pacific war, this force would be stretched thin, hampered by its lack of combat experience, and exposed to America’s superior systems.