VIGIL CONSILIUM
Context. Not headlines.
Equipment catalogue · shared across conflicts

Missile / precision strike

Conventional ballistic and cruise missile capability

The land-based conventional missile capability that features in every assessment of the regional balance — recorded here as a broad category only, with no targeting-relevant detail.

Dongfeng / Changjian families China Successive families fielded from the 1990s to the present.

Status as of
2026-09
Last reviewed
2026-09-09

AssessmentLow confidence

Recognition context, not a stat sheet. The catalogue covers major publicly documented systems relevant to the conflicts Vigil covers — not an exhaustive order of battle. No quantities, availability or current allocations are recorded.

The record What this system is, where it comes from, who operates it and which of Vigil’s modules it is relevant to — with the evidence each of those rests on.

Fielded Evidence: Reported
Silhouette · not to scale

Record

FamilyDongfeng / Changjian families
VariantsDF-15; DF-16; DF-17; DF-21; DF-26
OriginChina
ManufacturerChinese state defence industry
EraSuccessive families fielded from the 1990s to the present.
Appears inTaiwan Strait

Conflict relevance

This is the catalogue's single record for this system. It is relevant to the module below; each module's Force Atlas shows how it is used there.

Taiwan Strait · Force Atlas

Operators

People's Republic of China · Primary operator

Battlefield role

Long-range conventional strike. This is the capability class most responsible for the shift in regional military assessments over the past two decades, because it complicates the operations of any force in the theatre.

Strengths

Large and diverse inventory across families and ranges, produced by a mature industrial base — widely assessed as the most consequential single element of Chinese military modernisation for this theatre.

Limitations

Entirely untested in conflict. Publicly reported corruption investigations reaching senior levels of the Rocket Force from 2023 raise real questions about readiness and procurement quality that outside analysts cannot resolve. Missile inventories are also finite in ways rarely reflected in popular analysis, and reload and sustainment capacity is not publicly known.

Visual identification

Road-mobile transporter-erector-launchers — multi-axle heavy vehicles carrying a canister or an exposed missile body, most often seen in parade footage rather than in the field. Vigil identifies the vehicle class and publishes no recognition detail that would distinguish variants by role, which is the point at which identification content becomes targeting content.

Documented conflict use

Publicly displayed at PRC military parades and described in successive US Department of Defense annual reports on Chinese military power. Launches into areas around Taiwan were publicly announced and reported during the August 2022 exercises. Taiwan publicly stated in July 2026 that its long-range early-warning radar detected and tracked a Chinese ballistic launch through its opening phase. Vigil records that these events occurred and publishes no inventories, no basing, no ranges to specific places and no employment concepts.

Branch & service operators

Partial Confidence: Low Sources: US Department of Defense — China Military Power Report↗ · IISS Military Balance↗ · CSIS China Power Project and ChinaPower analysis↗ Methodology Corrections

Assessed as of — 2026-09 Last reviewed — 2026-09-09