A growing missile threat to the US homeland and the emerging arms race

(Daniel Salisbury – IISS) In March 2026, then-Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard released the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community. The document noted that the United States Intelligence Community projected a more-than fivefold expansion of missile threats to the US homeland, ‘to more than 16,000 missiles by 2035, from the current figure of more than 3,000 missiles’. The report noted that China, Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia would continue to pursue advanced and long-range missiles. These states would allegedly pair these with ‘cheaper, expendable systems’ – likely one-way attack uninhabited aerial vehicles (OWA UAVs) – to ‘stress U.S. missile defenses’ with affordable mass. The origins of this assessment date back to 2025, when US President Donald Trump announced the ‘Golden Dome’ missile-defence shield. As part of the Presidential Action, he required that ‘an updated assessment of the strategic missile threat to the Homeland’ be submitted within 60 days. The assessment prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and released in May 2025 provides a breakdown of the roughly 16,000 missile threats mentioned in the 2026 Annual Threat Assessment (the May 2025 Golden Dome assessment schematic includes a total of 16,606 missiles). The projections suggested some growth in adversarial states nuclear arsenals. For example, China’s number of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) is projected to grow from 400 to 700 and its submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) from 72 to at least 132. – A growing missile threat to the US homeland and the emerging arms race