China's drone swarms just got smarter, faster and harder to kill

AllAfrica

a day ago

This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that Chinese aerospace engineers have proposed a breakthrough upgrade for People's Liberation Army (PLA) drones, drawing lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war, where approximately 90% of Russian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were reportedly neutralized by advanced air defenses.
Published in the July issue of Acta Armamentarii, the research—led by Bi Wenhao of Northwestern Polytechnical University—introduces a 'terminal evasion' system that equips small to medium-sized drones with compact, side-mounted rocket boosters.
These boosters enable drones to execute abrupt, high-G maneuvers in the final seconds before missile impact, disrupting tracking algorithms and causing incoming warheads to detonate in empty space.
Digital simulations cited in the study show survivability rates exceeding 87%, with evasive shifts occurring within a one-to-two-second window and lateral thrust reportedly surpassing 16Gs—far beyond conventional aerodynamic limits.
While the concept demonstrates significant promise in controlled environments, real-world implementation poses notable challenges. Synchronizing booster activation with flight controls demands precise thrust vectoring, and the integration of additional components introduces trade-offs in payload, fuel capacity, and overall flight stability.
The system's performance against faster or more adaptive interceptors remains untested, and operational deployment would require robust surveillance networks and onboard computing capable of autonomous, split-second decision-making.
Still, analysts say the innovation could shift the logic of swarm warfare. Upgrading individual drones from cheap throwaways into survivable strike platforms could allow the PLA to turn vulnerable swarms into formations capable of saturating sophisticated air defenses. The proposal underscores China's growing emphasis on survivability and agility in unmanned systems as battlefield threats evolve.
Tye Graham and Peter Singer note in a May 2025 Defense One article that PLA drone countermeasures in exercises already achieved a 40% kill rate, leaving a modest 60% survival rate for drones. The 'terminal evasion' concept aims to increase that rate by 27%, reflecting Beijing's belief that raising the survivability of individual drones enhances a swarm's ability to overwhelm enemy sensors and interceptors.
The logic is backed by battlefield precedent. Jorge Rivero writes in a March 2025 article for the Modern Warfare Institute (MWI) that drone strikes account for 70% of Russian casualties and, in some areas of the front, 90% of Russian equipment losses in engagements with Ukrainian forces. Such figures confirm the tactical potency of drones even with high attrition rates, suggesting that improving their survivability could be a force multiplier.
Yet China's military drone program faces structural weaknesses that may limit the impact of these innovations. John S Van Oudenaren points out in a May 2025 China Aeronautical Studies Institute (CASI) report that the PLA heavily relies on civilian drone manufacturers like DJI, which lack the military-grade standards and secure supply chains needed for wartime resilience.
He further highlights fragmentation among suppliers, poor coordination between commercial and defense sectors, and limited operational testing as persistent barriers to effective integration.
According to Oudenaren, China's drone industry also struggles with vulnerabilities to electronic warfare, insecure communications, and underdeveloped autonomy. Without centralized oversight or dedicated defense infrastructure, he says, these issues constrain the PLA's ability to militarize its commercial drone base fully. While Beijing's push for swarm resilience marks a doctrinal shift, these underlying gaps could blunt its operational effectiveness.
By contrast, the US approach to drone warfare has historically prioritized quality over quantity. SCMP noted in December 2024 that the US integrates high-end drones like the Predator and autonomous wingmen into its network-centric strategy, emphasizing sensor fusion and interoperability. SCMP says that China, by contrast, leans on mass production and AI-enabled autonomy to achieve asymmetric saturation.
Both sides now see drone survivability and scale not as technical details, but as the future of power projection. That dichotomy may be narrowing. In August 2023, the US Department of Defense (DoD) unveiled its Replicator Initiative to counter China's numerical advantage with a push to deploy thousands of attritable, autonomous, all-domain systems—including aerial drones and undersea vehicles—by 2025.
Spearheaded by the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), Replicator's first phase focuses on fielding low-cost, mass-producible platforms designed to survive contested environments and complicate enemy targeting through swarming tactics and distributed autonomy.
Replicator reflects a broader shift toward disposability, scalability, and speed. Unlike legacy systems that are expensive and slow to produce, Replicator platforms are meant to operate with minimal human oversight and accept battlefield losses as a cost of saturation.
Underscoring the shift, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth outlined a sweeping overhaul in a July 2025 memo to restore US drone dominance. Citing Ukraine as proof of drones' transformative lethality, the memo rescinds procurement restrictions and delegates acquisition authority directly to warfighters to accelerate deployment.
Backed by US Executive Order 14307, the plan emphasizes domestic manufacturing, streamlined acquisition, and combat-realistic training, including force-on-force drone simulations. The DoD will approve hundreds of US-made systems for frontline units, integrate emergent technologies, and break through bureaucratic inertia. Hegseth warns that outdated policies must not constrain lethality amid rapid technological change.
Despite these initiatives, the US still lags behind China in drone production scale, speed, and affordability. The New York Times reported in July 2025 that China's military drone base, built on civilian mass production, vastly outpaces US capabilities. DJI alone produces millions of low-cost drones, such as the Mavic—sold for $300 to $5,000—which has been widely weaponized in Ukraine.
The report states that while US defense contractors excel at developing sophisticated platforms like the Predator and Reaper, such systems are increasingly ill-suited for modern battlefields where mass-produced, expendable drones dominate. Even with recent policy shifts and executive orders aiming to revitalize domestic production, the US lacks the industrial scale to match China's rapid, cost-efficient output.
The US drone shortfall is not just about budgets—it's about industrial architecture. Martin Feldman and Gene Keselman delve deeper into these production gaps in a July 2025 War on the Rocks article.
They argue that although the US has industrial strengths in plastics, motor machining, and automotive-grade camera modules, it lacks a comprehensive wartime-scale mobilization strategy. While they say it's feasible to build domestic motor lines and repurpose car camera supply chains, critical bottlenecks remain in battery and circuit board capacity.
By contrast, Feldman and Keselman note that Chinese civilian factories can retool within a year to produce one billion weaponized drones annually, using under 1% of their existing assembly capacity and without significantly straining battery or circuit board output.
They warn that without major shifts in US industrial policy and long-term procurement contracts, America risks strategic vulnerability in a drone war driven not just by AI and autonomy, but by sheer output. Without bold industrial reforms and sustained procurement, the US risks losing not just the drone war but the ability to fight it at scale.