Can Hypersonic Missiles Be Intercepted? China vs India’s BMD

Defence Analysis · Missile Technology · Markets

On 27 March 1999, a Yugoslav air defence battalion did something the United States Air Force had built an entire doctrine around being impossible. Colonel Zoltán Dani’s crew, operating a Soviet SA-3 system that dated back to the early 1960s, shot down an F-117 Nighthawk — the stealth fighter the Pentagon had spent a decade insisting simply could not be tracked. Dani’s men had spent weeks studying the aircraft’s predictable flight corridor out of Aviano, and they switched their own radar on for scattered seconds at a time, just long enough to get a lock without revealing their position to the American jets hunting for them.

Washington’s mistake was not underestimating a 1960s missile system. It was assuming that “impossible to hit” and “temporarily unmatched” were the same thing.

That distinction is now the entire argument playing out over hypersonic weapons — missiles that travel above Mach 5 and manoeuvre unpredictably through the atmosphere, making them harder to track than a conventional ballistic missile on a fixed arc. China rolled a new generation of them through city streets in April 2026, reopening the question defence planners have never fully answered: can hypersonic missiles be intercepted at all? India, with far less fanfare, just gave its own answer a name.

Can Hypersonic Missiles Be Intercepted?

That gap is precisely why China’s newest missile and India’s newest interceptor programme, arriving in public view within months of each other, matter more together than either does alone.

China’s DF-27: A Carrier Killer With Intercontinental Reach

In April 2026, Chinese social media footage showed a convoy of transporter-erector-launchers, assessed by multiple open-source analysts as the DF-27, moving through city streets during what several sources characterised as an urban warfare drill. It was an unusually visible moment for a missile China had kept largely under wraps since it was first flagged in Western intelligence assessments around 2021.

The DF-27 sits in an odd, deliberately ambiguous category. The Federation of American Scientists and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists assess its range at between 5,000 and 8,000 kilometres, dual-capable for both conventional and nuclear payloads, and equipped with a manoeuvring hypersonic glide vehicle similar in concept to the shorter-range DF-17, which the US Air Force’s China Aerospace Studies Institute assesses has been deployed to at least three PLA Rocket Force brigades. Chinese state media all but confirmed as much in August 2026, when CCTV aired rare footage of six DF-17 launch vehicles moving together and a military affairs expert told the Global Times the missile is now “mass-deployed” and on combat duty. Andrew Erickson of the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute has described it as the first conventional intercontinental-range missile of its kind, with an anti-ship variant capable of striking naval forces “out to intercontinental distances.” One reported test in early 2026 put its speed at Mach 8.6 during the glide phase — a figure that comes from a single specialist outlet and has not been independently corroborated elsewhere, so TES treats it as reported rather than confirmed.

What the DF-27 changes is geometry, not just speed. Its road-mobile launch platform means China does not need forward bases to threaten targets across the Second Island Chain, including Guam and, depending on launch position, parts of the US West Coast. It also folds anti-ship and land-attack roles into a single system, extending the same long-range strike logic already built into the DF-26 and DF-21D “carrier killer” family — but with a flight profile current US Navy defences were not designed around.

The Interceptors Racing to Catch Up

Washington does not currently have an operational answer to that flight profile, and it is not hiding that fact. The Missile Defense Agency’s “Project Maverick,” under its new Low-Cost Defeat initiative, is aiming for a flight test in fiscal year 2027 of an interim system to track and defeat hypersonic threats — a stopgap, in the agency’s own framing, until something more capable arrives.

That “something more capable” is the Glide Phase Interceptor. Northrop Grumman’s contract for the programme was increased past $1.3 billion in April 2026, accelerating development toward a June 2028 milestone and designed to be compatible with the existing Aegis naval combat system. The programme sits inside the broader “Golden Dome” missile-defence initiative, whose sheer scale says as much about the difficulty of this problem as any single interceptor does. The Congressional Budget Office estimated in May 2026 that a full Golden Dome architecture could cost $1.2 trillion over twenty years — and that stopping even a modest attack of ten enemy missiles in the boost phase alone could require close to 7,800 space-based interceptors, according to CBO modelling reported by the Atlantic Council. Set against that, the existing ground layer looks modest: seven operational THAAD batteries worldwide, with an eighth expected later this year.

Put plainly: the country with the world’s largest defence budget is still years away from fielding a dedicated counter to the weapon China just drove through a city street.

India’s Quiet Answer: DRDO’s Phase 3 BMD

This is where the story usually stops being about India. It should not.

On 10 and 11 June 2026, the Defence Research and Development Organisation conducted three consecutive flight tests at the Integrated Test Range, Chandipur — the AD-1 and AD-2 interceptors, part of Phase 2 of India’s Ballistic Missile Defence programme, alongside the Naval Anti-Ship Missile-Medium Range. According to DRDO, the tests validated a multi-layered defence architecture capable of engaging even intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM)-class threats, with AD-1 handling shorter-range endo-atmospheric intercepts and AD-2 covering the longer-range exo-atmospheric layer.

That success has already triggered the next phase. DRDO has begun preliminary development on two new interceptor systems — Advanced Defence Anti-Hypersonic (AD-AH) and Advanced Defence Anti-Missile (AD-AM) — explicitly designed to counter hypersonic glide vehicles and missiles carrying Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs). Unlike India’s earlier BMD phases, which focused on conventional ballistic missile threats, Phase 3 is being built for the manoeuvring, multi-warhead threat class that the DF-27 represents.

There is a striking parallel worth sitting with here. If DRDO successfully demonstrates AD-AM’s multi-target engagement capability before a comparable American system enters testing, India could become the first country to flight-test an interceptor capable of independently engaging multiple targets from a single launch vehicle — a defensive mirror of the MIRV technology India has now twice flight-tested on the offensive side with Agni-V, most recently in May 2026, and which analysts assess is approaching operational induction. The sword and the shield are arriving on the same national programme, a few years apart.

DRDO Chairman Samir V Kamat has separately confirmed the organisation is pursuing two parallel hypersonic strike programmes of its own — a hypersonic glide missile, built around the Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile’s glide vehicle, and a hypersonic cruise missile, the latter having cleared a major technical hurdle in January 2026 when DRDO’s Hyderabad-based laboratory completed a 12-minute ground test of an actively cooled scramjet combustor. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh called it a foundation for the country’s hypersonic cruise missile development. India’s existing air-defence layer, detailed in TES’s earlier look at Mission Sudarshan Chakra and Project Kusha, would sit alongside AD-AH and AD-AM rather than replace it.

None of this places India ahead of China or the United States in operational hypersonic capability — Phase 3 remains in early development, and no public test date exists yet for AD-AH or AD-AM. But it does mean India is one of only a handful of countries treating the interception side of this problem as seriously as the strike side, at a moment when most of the global conversation — including TES’s own earlier coverage of the Dark Eagle hypersonic missile during the Iran blockade — has stayed fixated on who can build the fastest missile rather than who can stop one.

The Market Read: Where the Order Book Goes Next

Every phase of India’s missile programme eventually becomes a contract, and contracts move two stocks in particular. Bharat Dynamics Limited remains India’s sole dedicated missile manufacturer, producing the Akash surface-to-air system, Astra air-to-air missile and MRSAM for all three armed forces; its order book stood at ₹26,176 crore as of 31 March 2026, up from ₹22,814 crore a year earlier, on ₹5,909 crore of fresh orders through the year. Bharat Electronics Limited, which reportedly holds roughly 70 percent of BrahMos production capacity alongside BDL, closed FY26 with a record turnover of ₹26,750 crore and an order book near ₹74,000 crore — including a single day in March 2026 when it booked ₹6,795 crore in fresh orders spanning mountain radars, Tejas avionics and electronic warfare suites.

The relationship between order news and share price is less mechanical than it looks, though. BDL’s FY26 revenue came to ₹2,442 crore for the full year, but the March quarter alone told a rougher story — revenue fell 73 percent year-on-year to ₹488 crore in Q4, and net profit dropped 58 percent to ₹113 crore, a reminder that a full pipeline and a strong quarter are not the same thing. When BDL disclosed a ₹1,347.71 crore order from Hindustan Aeronautics on 24 June 2026, its shares actually closed lower that day. A separately reported ₹10,000 crore Army order for BrahMos Extended Range missiles, expected as early as November 2026, remains unsigned and should be treated as such. Phase 3 BMD has not reached the production-contract stage at all, which means the real market signal is not in interceptor orders yet — it is in whether AD-AH and AD-AM clear Defence Acquisition Council approval, the point at which BDL and BEL have historically seen their next leg of order-book growth. TES’s earlier profile of India’s defence-sector boom and its concentration risk around BEL and HAL covers the broader pattern in more depth.

What to Watch

The Takeaway

Zoltán Dani’s SA-3 did not make stealth technology obsolete. It made obvious something the doctrine had quietly assumed away: that “cannot be intercepted” is a statement about today’s countermeasures, not tomorrow’s. The F-117 kept flying after 1999. It just stopped flying as if it were invisible.

The DF-27 is not unstoppable either — it is simply ahead of the interceptors built to answer it, in the same way the F-117 was briefly ahead of a 1960s missile crew willing to study its habits. So can hypersonic missiles be intercepted, in the end? Not as a fixed fact about physics — it is a running scoreboard between whoever builds the glide vehicle and whoever studies it hardest. What Phase 3 of India’s BMD programme represents is not a solved problem. It is India choosing to be one of the countries doing the studying, rather than one waiting to find out the hard way whether the gap closes in time.