New Delhi: US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on Saturday, May 30, declined to characterise either India or Pakistan as a missile threat to the United States, despite a US intelligence community assessment presented to Congress in March that had named Pakistan’s long-range ballistic missile programme as a potential threat to the American homeland.Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Hegseth said Washington was “not pointing a finger” at either country, and he said both had played a role in regional peace.His remarks came in response to a question that explicitly invoked Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s opening statement to the Senate Intelligence Committee on March 18, in which she had named Pakistan alongside Russia, China, North Korea and Iran as countries developing missile systems that “put our homeland within range”.A Pakistani delegate had posed a question to Hegseth about how he assessed India’s long-range missile capability, “particularly in terms of the recent test of Agni-6 ICBM with a range of approximately 12,000 kilometres” that she claimed could place parts of Europe and America within reach. Her question opened by noting that Gabbard had identified Pakistan’s potential ICBM capability as a future threat to the United States.“I think both sides there are going to see understandable threats coming from the other, maybe some of which we see differently, and countries are going to want to develop ICBM threats, but we’re not pointing a finger, at least from our view right now, at either country and calling them a threat to us, and we’re grateful for, you know, in each of their lanes, the benefits they’ve given to peace around the world,” Hegseth said.The senior Trump administration official further praised Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership, again drawing a parallel.“I mentioned India here (in his speech), but I very easily could have mentioned Pakistan and the role that the field marshal and the prime minister are playing in peace negotiations,” he said, referring to Pakistan Army Chief Field Marshal Asim Munir and Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif.In his prepared address earlier, Hegseth had described India as “a critical anchor to hold the line” in South Asia. He said India was modernising its military to carry its share of the security burden, “particularly in the Indian Ocean”, and was building heavy industrial and logistics capacity that included “the ability to repair and maintain our shared platforms and support US Navy vessels operating forward in the theatre”. He also confirmed that Washington and New Delhi were moving ahead with co-production of Javelin anti-tank guided munitions.Hegseth called the close ties between Trump and the Pakistani leadership as “an unexpected development and a true friendship developing there, which I think is important, and you saw that in the ability of the president to come together on brokering a peace between India and Pakistan, two nuclear-capable countries”.India has consistently rejected the contention that Trump brokered a ceasefire after four days of clashes between the South Asian rival last May. The MEA first publicly dismissed the US president’s account, and has since reiterated that the understanding to halt firing was reached bilaterally through direct contact between the directors-general of military operations of the two countries.In March, Gabbard in her opening statement had told lawmakers that “Pakistan’s long-range ballistic missile development potentially could include ICBMs with a range capable of striking the homeland”.The 2026 Annual Threat Assessment report stated in its South Asia section that “Pakistan continues to develop increasingly sophisticated missile technology that provides its military the means to develop missile systems with the capability to strike targets beyond South Asia, and if these trends continue, ICBMs that would threaten the US”.The same report had also recorded, in the same section, that “India-Pakistan relations remain a risk for nuclear conflict” and that “President Trump’s intervention deescalated the most recent nuclear tensions” following the April 2025 terrorist attack near Pahalgam.New Delhi had welcomed the missile-threat finding. Replying to Gabbard’s testimony at the MEA briefing on March 19, spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal had said Pakistan had “a history of clandestine nuclear proliferation, and statements like this again make it clear what kind of threat they pose to the world because of their clandestine nuclear operations”.The MEA in November had framed President Donald Trump’s remarks about Pakistan testing nuclear weapons in similar terms, citing Islamabad’s record of “secret and illegal” nuclear activities and the A.Q. Khan proliferation network.On May 8, the Defence Research and Development Organisation flight-tested an advanced Agni missile equipped with Multiple Independently Targetable Re-entry Vehicle technology from Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam Island off the Odisha coast. The test was widely assessed as an Agni-5 variant with MIRV capability rather than the longer-range Agni-6, which remains under development.