Simultaneous disruption and progress, with a relentless Taiwan-focused capability development deadline.
That’s the overriding theme of the 25th edition of the Department of Defense’s China Military Power Report, released on Dec. 23, 2025. Despite extensive leadership purges and ongoing disciplinary investigations across China’s military and defense industry, the 2025 report concludes that China continues to make progress toward General Secretary Xi Jinping’s 2027 “Centennial Military Building Goal” and associated warfighting capabilities against Taiwan.
The report shows China’s military undergoing simultaneous disruption and advancement, with leadership purges and procurement-related investigations generating short-term turbulence even as Xi’s armed forces surge forward. The report offers the clearest articulation to date of the origins, meaning, and operational implications of Xi’s 2027 goal, framing it as a capabilities-based requirement oriented toward coercion and potential warfighting against Taiwan and U.S. and allied intervention forces. It documents significant progress in nuclear posture enhancement, long-range conventional strike, and capability and resilience of supporting architecture. Moreover, it situates gray-zone coercion, Chinese coast guard and maritime militia activity, and expanding overseas access within a broader pattern of progress. Finally, while leadership investigations and removals have imposed immediate readiness and continuity costs, the Pentagon judges that such actions may ultimately yield a more disciplined, coherent, and capable Chinese military. This underscores the central conclusion: Organizational churn should not obscure continued Chinese military modernization momentum toward 2027 and beyond.
As it has for a quarter century, the report offers detailed information not typically available to the public. Many 2025 report datapoints reflect developments only through late 2024 or early 2025. This lag effect is an unavoidable reality of information cutoff and internal review timelines for a U.S. government document prepared systematically for public release, but it is likely accentuated by this year’s record-late publication.
Targeting Taiwan Drives Dramatic Developments
The report provides the clearest account to date of Xi’s goal of achieving by the end of 2027 the capabilities required to prevail in a Taiwan conflict. This objective requires three integrated strategic capabilities: the ability to credibly prevail at acceptable cost in Beijing’s most stressing contingency (a Taiwan conflict involving America); deterring or constraining American intervention, in part with nuclear capabilities; and deterring the opening of additional fronts and the involvement of U.S. allies and partners.
Under Xi’s rule, China’s military development is advancing accordingly, and the report assesses Beijing’s motivations and likely challenges regarding four major Taiwan scenarios, which Beijing might well attempt to execute in some combination.
The first of these scenarios, coercion short of war, entails combining escalating military pressure with economic, informational, and diplomatic coercion — potentially including cyber, electronic, and limited conventional strikes to intimidate Taiwan, disrupt its infrastructure, and undermine public confidence in its ability to defend itself. The efficacy of such limited means hinges on the variables of Taiwanese resistance and resilience as well as American involvement and the significant risk that such a minimalist approach would not achieve decisive results.
A second scenario — a joint firepower strike campaign, involving precision strikes to cripple defenses and leadership — would hinge on a key structural weakness identified in the report. The report assesses at length that China would struggle to closely coordinate strikes and battle damage assessment among services and operations groups in the time-sensitive manner required.
In a third scenario, a joint blockade campaign, China could attempt to force Taiwan’s surrender through prolonged obstruction and interdiction of sea and air traffic, backed by missile strikes, limited island seizures, and concurrent electronic, cyber, and information operations designed to isolate the island and pressure Taiwan into negotiation or capitulation.
Finally, a joint island landing campaign would entail a large-scale amphibious invasion in which China’s military seeks to achieve air and maritime superiority, break through Taiwan’s coastal defenses, establish and sustain a beachhead, and seize key territory to decisively force unification. The difficulty of achieving decisive control over Taiwan using the first three campaigns might lead Beijing to this fourth campaign, but it would be the most complex and difficult of all to pull off.
Across all four scenarios, the report judges that China’s military likely faces constraints in employing cyber and other non-kinetic capabilities due to limited combat experience and ongoing organizational and integration challenges resulting from the 2024 restructuring of its information and cyber forces.
To reduce the aforementioned gaps, China is rapidly developing warfighting capabilities and rehearsing their application and combination through large-scale, sophisticated exercises. China’s Dec. 29-30 military exercise around Taiwan and nearby areas, “Justice Mission 2025,” showcased a range of capabilities detailed in the 2025 report. First mentioned in the Pentagon’s 2023 report (p. 50), the 280-kilometer-range PCH191 long-range rocket artillery system and FD280 ballistic missile featured heavily both in the exercise and in the 2025 report’s depiction of China’s coverage over the Taiwan Strait by close-range ballistic missiles, short-range ballistic missiles, and surface-to-air missiles. The 2025 report notes that “other, shorter-range, guided and unguided munitions … can also be fired from the PCH191 in multiple quantities.” Authoritative details on the PCH191, one of China’s most numerous, potent, and versatile weapons against Taiwan, are just one of many key findings underscoring the report’s utility and significance.
Nuclear Posture Development, Missile Capabilities, and Networked Architecture
Within the 2027 preparations framework, Xi has clearly elevated nuclear weapons as core to his objectives, constraining American and allied options, and coercively enveloping Taiwan. The centrality of nuclear capabilities to these top-priority aims explains the unprecedented nuclear emphasis and development over his more than 13 years in power.
China under Xi is executing a historically rapid nuclear buildup, moving from several hundred operational warheads to the current 600+ to potentially over a thousand within this decade, while simultaneously diversifying its delivery triad. China is dramatically increasing the number and variety of its nuclear weapons and delivery systems and the responsiveness of their posture.
The report highlights three major trends: triad development, retaliatory responsiveness, and scale and scope of inventory. Triad and force expansion entails improving and diversifying land-based, sea-based, and air-launched systems including silo-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, JL-series submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and nuclear-capable aircraft. The fielded JL-3 submarine-launched ballistic missile ranges most of the continental United States. The DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile and the H-6N bomber’s air-launched ballistic missile offer delivery systems for low-yield (<10 kilotons) precision nuclear strikes.
The Chinese armed forces are also strengthening their retaliatory readiness through the addition of theater-range, potentially low-yield options and delivery systems suitable for regionally focused nuclear signaling. An emerging early warning counterstrike posture incorporates improved detection timelines, rapid-launch training activity, and expanding hardened basing infrastructure. Early warning satellites and long-range phased-array radars are part of an increasingly robust space tracking and ballistic missile warning network that enables inbound intercontinental ballistic missile detection within 90 seconds and command alert within 3‑4 minutes.
To operationalize this posture, China has likely loaded more than 100 silos with DF-31-class intercontinental ballistic missiles. While emphasizing uncertainty regarding doctrinal thresholds for employment, the report also discusses activities that appear oriented toward nuclear signaling and operational rehearsal. China’s 2024 DF-31B intercontinental ballistic missile Pacific splashdown test rehearsed nuclear signaling launches into broad ocean areas. Rapid silo-based-intercontinental ballistic missile launch training, involving multiple launches, occurred in December 2024.
China’s missile inventory reflects increasing operational depth and redundancy. The report assesses that China fields a burgeoning, increasingly varied missile arsenal, encompassing conventional, dual-capable, and nuclear systems across short-, intermediate-, and intercontinental-range categories. China’s DF-27 is now assessed as fielded with several variants, including an anti-ship ballistic missile and a conventionally armed 5,000‑8,000 kilometer intercontinental ballistic missile ranging the northwestern continental United States. DF-27 variants thus represent China’s fourth family of ground-launched anti-ship ballistic missiles, following the DF-17, DF-21D, and DF-26. Launch platform diversity across such major missile families gives China’s military increasing flexibility in campaign design. The size and growth rate of China’s missile stockpile reduces constraints associated with platform or target prioritization. The report frames these developments not as discrete technological breakthroughs, but as cumulative increases in operational depth, redundancy, and coercive leverage.
China’s integrated command, control, communications, information, and targeting enterprise supports an increasingly resilient and responsive kill chain, linking sensing, decision-making, and strike execution across nuclear and conventional domains. The Chinese government’s investment in extended maritime and air awareness and cueing well beyond the first island chain includes Skywave over-the-horizon radars — systems that bounce high-frequency radio waves off the Earth’s ionosphere down toward distant targets — allowing detection far beyond the line-of-sight limits of conventional radar. Together with other land-based sensors, the report projects, China’s Skywave radars “can probably detect ships and aircraft between the first and second island chains.” Drawing on such infrastructure, the report states that “In an operation to counter foreign military involvement,” kinetic strikes by China’s military “would probably be effective within 1,500-2,000 nautical miles from the Chinese mainland.”
Extensive fiber-optic communications cables connect China’s mainland facilities and its South China Sea outposts. The latter interconnectivity is documented uniquely in the report, which also describes the military infrastructure now embedded across China’s Spratly and Paracel fortifications. The report also lays out in detail how this enables persistent forward command, intelligence, targeting support, logistics, and coercive maritime operations rather than episodic activity.
Near Seas Coercion, Far Seas Access
The 2025 report devotes extensive coverage to the operations of China’s coast guard and maritime militia as components of concerted coercion in coordination with China’s navy. Among newly documented or expanded details, China’s coast guard and maritime militia vessels have engaged in ramming, aggressive blocking, and physical interference in the South and East China Seas. The report (pp. 38, 52, 71) cites June 2024 clashes near Second Thomas Shoal involving militiamen wielding axes and spears, causing serious injury to a Philippine sailor. It notes reporting that some militia vessels near Scarborough Shoal were painted white to resemble Chinese coast guard hulls. The Pentagon understands these incidents as part of a gray-zone campaign of sustained pressure, calibrated escalation control, and (implausible) deniability.
While dedicated coverage of Xi’s policy timelines out to 2035 and 2049 is beyond the scope of this essay, it’s nevertheless important to recognize the larger context: that Xi’s 2027 goal is a “waypoint to a waypoint.” In other words, far from the end of the story of China’s defense modernization or its challenge to the United States and its allies and partners, Beijing is simultaneously working to complete its desired military force structure by 2035 and eventually have unmatched military capabilities by 2049.
To protect expanding overseas economic and political interests, Beijing continues to pursue other measures, including both diplomatic engagements and military support presence. In addition to China’s existing support base in Djibouti, the report confirms a Chinese joint logistics and training center at Ream naval base in Cambodia and identifies 21 potential host nations under consideration for future access or logistics arrangements, including Pakistan, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Bangladesh.
The report also references Chinese interactions with armed non-state actors in the context of maritime security risks affecting Chinese commercial traffic, while emphasizing complex associated activity. It confirms that Beijing has conducted private outreach to the Houthis since the beginning of their attack campaign on merchant vessels in order to safeguard Chinese commercial shipping operating in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. It further confirms that, beginning in November 2023, companies based in China have supplied dual-use components that Houthi forces have used in their Red Sea attacks.
In a bombshell projection published nowhere else, the report states that by 2035 China seeks to build six aircraft carriers beyond the three it already has, for a total of nine. Building half a dozen carriers over the next decade would afford Beijing with some semblance of blue water force structure parity with Washington in the Indo-Pacific. This would be a heavy lift. China’s third aircraft carrier, Fujian (CV-18), took ten years to build. Construction took place from March 2015 to February 2016, and it was finally commissioned on Nov. 5, 2025. Nevertheless, China is clearly pursuing a “world-class navy” as part of a “world-class military” by mid-century.
Leadership Investigations, Removals, and Organizational Impact
Despite widespread removals of Chinese military and defense industry leaders, Beijing continues to make steady progress toward its 2027 goal. The report contains the most extensive public accounting to date of officer investigations, removals, and related defense-industry disciplinary cases since such longstanding efforts intensified in 2023. It suggests that resulting corrections and improvements have the potential to ultimately produce a more disciplined, institutionally coherent force. The report does not project a concrete timeframe for improvements. Rather, it suggests a consolidation after the heightened period of investigations, removals, and replacements generating organizational churn runs its course and the force benefits from improved discipline and reliability. The realization of some improvements could span and extend beyond Xi’s 2027 milestone.
The report documents dismissals across every service and theater command, with the Chinese rocket force most affected. It details unprecedented cross-service leadership transfers into senior rocket force positions in 2023, with one transferee later himself removed. It chronicles parallel investigations involving senior executives in missile, aviation, and shipbuilding enterprises. The report emphasizes that these shakeups have produced near-term disruptions in organizational continuity and force readiness but enable medium-term gains if procurement and leadership integrity are strengthened as a result.
One of the report’s most useful contributions is its explanation of the internal process by which senior officers and associated civilian executives are investigated, evaluated at the Central Committee level, and referred for prosecution — often over extended timelines during which they remain in limbo. On the military side, for example, Gen. Li Shangfu was removed as China’s defense minister and a member of the Central Military Commission in October 2023, and expelled from the Chinese Communist Party in June 2024, whereupon military prosecutors commenced formal prosecution. The report explains that disciplinary processes involving state-owned enterprise administrators typically proceed even more slowly than those involving military personnel, which can prolong industrial disruption. For example, Aviation Industry Corporation of China Chairman Tan Ruisong was removed in March 2023, declared under investigation in August 2024, expelled from the party in February 2025, and arrested in March 2025 for formal prosecution. Tan’s process started seven months before Li’s, yet ended two months later.
The report identifies two areas of clear negative impact. First, it reports that “some new recruits question the [military]’s absolute loyalty to the party.” The China Maritime Studies Institute has similarly identified concerns regarding commitment to Chinese communist principles among some young personnel. Second, the report identifies corruption compromising procurement and hardware capabilities. In remarks to military delegates at the March 2024 National People’s Congress session, Central Military Commission second Vice Chairman He Weidong (himself later removed) criticized the provision of substandard equipment to China’s armed forces and the submission of false reports to senior leadership. The report specifically cites “malfunctioning lids installed on missile silos” and “possibly the pier side sinking” of the Chinese navy’s first Zhou-class (Type 041) submarine during preparation for sea trials. The Pentagon’s 2024 report identified problems with missile silo lids, concluding with a critical caveat: “This investigation likely resulted in [China’s rocket force] repairing the silos, which would have increased the overall operational readiness of its silo-based force.” The 2025 report is unique in the authority of its informed speculation regarding the reason for the submarine’s sinking, but the status of future hulls should be visible to non-government analysts.
As with other aspects of China’s military development, multiple things are true at once: Short-term readiness risks coexist with the possibility of future advancement if China proves successful in addressing what have clearly been identified as systemic problems. Discoveries of corruption and other severe disciplinary violations, particularly up to the highest levels of the rocket force, have demonstrably shaken the confidence of Chinese leadership and generated organizational churn. Yet the 2025 report explicitly warns against assuming long-term weakness. It states that while these purges “very likely” create short-term disruptions, China’s forces could very well emerge from corrective restructuring more reliable and capable than ever before.
Conclusion: Restless Restructuring, Relentless Advance
China continues advancing toward Xi’s ambitious, aggressive military objectives for 2027 and beyond. The Pentagon’s 2025 report never suggests that Xi’s supreme authority is at all in question, or that any other elite actors are able to amass sufficient power to challenge the Chinese leader. Additionally, it does not suggest that removals have fundamentally derailed China’s modernization program. Rather, it characterizes the impacts as phase-bound disruptions occurring alongside continued progress in priority areas.
Given the pace of China’s military modernization, progress in many areas may already exceed what the Pentagon chronicles. Moreover, the 2025 report cannot cover everything. At 100 pages, it is the shortest since 2015 (98 pages), down from a height of 212 pages in 2023 and substantially shorter than the 2024 report (182 pages). Curiously, it contains almost nothing on the Chinese navy’s rapidly growing force structure.
Beijing inevitably fires off a fusillade of denunciations of the report and makes sweeping, unsubstantiated claims that it propagates falsehoods and exaggerates China’s capabilities. At the other extreme, some commentators take China’s progress out of context and purport that individual advances represent an “insurmountable” “game-changer” for the United States and its allies and partners. Testing of China’s YJ-20 missile occurred shortly after the report’s publication and could by no means be covered by it. Faulty analysis misrepresents the missile’s significance by categorically exaggerating its impact and the certainty thereof. China’s missiles are formidable indeed, and the YJ-20 is yet another example. But categorical polemics, in whatever direction, lack analytical soundness. Modern warfare between two leading militaries and a confrontation of systems-of-systems would entail extremely complex, multivariate equation(s) and should be treated analytically.
In conclusion, China’s military continues to modernize rapidly, with organizational turbulence occurring alongside substantial capability gains. For the United States and its allies, the central strategic takeaway is not disruption within China’s armed forces, but sustained progress toward 2027-aligned force development milestones — particularly in nuclear posture, long-range strike, coercive maritime operations, and networked supporting infrastructure — even amid leadership purges and procurement-related investigations.
Andrew S. Erickson, Ph.D., is a professor of strategy at the U.S. Naval War College and visiting scholar at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. In 2024, he received the Navy Superior Civilian Service Medal.
Disclaimer: The perspectives expressed here are those of the author alone, based solely on open sources. They do not represent the views, policies, or positions of the U.S. Naval War College, the Department of the Navy, or any other organization of the U.S. government.
**Please note, as a matter of house style, War on the Rocks will not use a different name for the U.S. Department of Defense until and unless the name is changed by statute by the U.S. Congress.
Image: Ministry of State of Indonesia via Wikimedia Commons
