For decades, the United States operated from a position of military dominance and assumed it would no longer need large land-based missile forces. Russia and China took a different path, steadily developing precisely those capabilities. The strategic landscape has since shifted, leaving Washington trying to close the gap in several critical areas, Advance writes.

The difference is particularly visible in maneuverable hypersonic weapons and ground-launched missiles of medium and intermediate range. Russia placed the Avangard and Kinzhal systems on combat duty earlier, while China built up a vast missile arsenal. The United States, by contrast, awarded its first major production contract for the ground-based Dark Eagle system only in 2026.

After the Cold War, Washington focused heavily on aircraft, aircraft carriers, overseas bases and global logistics. That approach allowed the US military to strike targets far from American territory, reducing the importance placed on a large inventory of long-range ground-launched missiles. Russia and China were preparing for different scenarios.

For Moscow, one of the central objectives was preserving the ability to carry out a retaliatory strike even as US missile defenses continued to develop. Washington’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 provided an additional incentive. Russia therefore concentrated on weapons designed to overcome such defenses.

Avangard, Zircon and Kinzhal emerged within that broader approach, although the three systems differ in their design and purpose.

China faced a different strategic environment. It was not bound by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which prohibited the United States and the Soviet Union, and later Russia, from deploying ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.

While Washington and Moscow remained constrained by those limits, Beijing spent decades expanding exactly that category of weapons, building an arsenal suited to the conditions of a possible conflict in the western Pacific. By 2025, the Pentagon estimated that China possessed around 3,050 missiles with ranges below the intercontinental level.

The US problem was not limited to military doctrine. After the Cold War, the country also gradually lost part of the industrial base needed to expand missile production quickly. The number of American manufacturers producing solid-fuel rocket motors fell from six in 1995 to two. As orders declined, experienced specialists left the industry and manufacturing expertise was lost.

Washington is now trying to rebuild those capabilities, but funding alone cannot quickly restore experience accumulated over decades. The United States is therefore dealing with the consequences of its own long-term choices: while Washington treated some categories of missile forces as less important, Russia and China consistently made them a priority.