Report Says China's Conventional Strike Threat to Australia Is Growing

A new assessment argues that China's ability to strike Australia directly is growing, citing the DF-27 missile, which the United States military has said carries a range of 5,000 to 8,000 kilometers. At the upper end of that range, parts of northern Australia and forward bases used by allied forces would fall within reach of weapons launched from the Chinese mainland.

The finding fits a wider pattern Polylog tracks across the Indo-Pacific. China's expanding land-based missile and nuclear forces are reshaping deterrence calculations and prompting Japan, Australia and their neighbors to enlarge their own militaries. Beijing characterizes its buildup as defensive and proportionate to United States and allied deployments in the region, while Washington and its partners describe it as a destabilizing accumulation of strike capability. The two framings disagree less on the hardware than on who is responding to whom.