In February 2026, China's coastguard released imagery showing drone operations over Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea — a rare public acknowledgment of how deeply unmanned systems have been integrated into Beijing's gray-zone enforcement apparatus. The footage was unremarkable in itself: a small rotary-wing drone conducting surveillance from a coastguard vessel. What was remarkable was the normalcy of it. Unmanned operations in contested waters are no longer experimental. They are routine.

This shift matters far beyond the South China Sea. The same technological revolution transforming drone warfare in Ukraine, the Red Sea, and the Caucasus is quietly rewriting the military calculus in the Taiwan Strait — arguably the most consequential potential battlespace on Earth. And the implications cut in directions that few mainstream analyses have fully absorbed.

The Scale of China's Unmanned Buildup

China is the world's largest producer of military drones, and the People's Liberation Army is their largest consumer. The scale of the buildup is difficult to overstate.

Aerial drones (UAVs): The PLA Air Force and PLA Navy Aviation operate an estimated 3,000+ military UAVs across all categories, according to a 2025 IISS assessment. These range from small tactical quadcopters to the GJ-11 Sharp Sword, a flying-wing stealth combat drone with an estimated 1,200 km combat radius. The WZ-7 Soaring Dragon, a high-altitude long-endurance (HALE) surveillance platform with a reported ceiling of 18,000 meters and 10-hour endurance, has been photographed operating from bases in Fujian Province — directly across the strait from Taiwan.

Maritime drones (USVs): China has invested heavily in unmanned surface vessels. The JARI multi-purpose USV, displayed at defense exhibitions since 2022, is a 15-meter autonomous vessel capable of anti-submarine warfare, mine countermeasures, and surface attack roles. Open-source intelligence reporting has identified at least two dedicated USV testing facilities along China's southeastern coast, including one on Wanshan Island in the Pearl River Delta that satellite imagery shows hosting dozens of unmanned vessels simultaneously.

Undersea drones (UUVs): Perhaps the most consequential and least visible element, China's unmanned undersea vehicle program includes the HSU-001, a large displacement UUV capable of autonomous seabed mapping, surveillance, and potentially mine delivery. The South China Morning Post reported in 2024 that China had deployed networks of autonomous underwater gliders in the Western Pacific to monitor ocean conditions and, potentially, submarine movements — a program the PLA has described as "ocean observation" but which has obvious military applications.

The aggregate picture: China is building an unmanned force across all domains — air, surface, and subsurface — at a pace and scale that no other military, including the United States, currently matches in sheer production volume.

The Offensive Calculus: Saturation by Expendability

The fundamental strategic logic of unmanned systems is simple: they decouple capability from survivability. A drone does not need to come home. This single fact reshapes the mathematics of military operations in ways that favor mass over quality, attrition over preservation, and the attacker's ability to accept losses.

In a Taiwan Strait scenario, the PLA's drone inventory creates several offensive possibilities that did not exist a decade ago:

Surveillance saturation. Before any kinetic action, establishing a real-time picture of Taiwan's defensive dispositions — mobile missile launchers, naval patrol boats, mined zones — is essential. A fleet of WZ-7 HALE drones operating at altitude, supplemented by hundreds of smaller tactical UAVs, could maintain persistent surveillance coverage of Taiwan's entire western coastline at a fraction of the cost and risk of manned reconnaissance aircraft. Taiwan's air defenses would face an impossible prioritization problem: expend limited surface-to-air missiles on each $5 million drone, or conserve them for the manned strike aircraft that follow?

Defense suppression. The lesson of Ukraine — where both sides use cheap FPV drones to destroy armored vehicles costing hundreds of times more — translates directly. Swarms of expendable attack drones, each carrying modest warheads, could target Taiwan's air defense radars, coastal missile batteries, and command nodes. The cost-exchange ratio is devastating: a $50,000 loitering munition destroying a $3 million radar system is a trade any military planner would make repeatedly.

Maritime area denial. Autonomous USVs loaded with explosives — the naval equivalent of the one-way attack drone — could swarm Taiwan's naval vessels in port or during sortie. The Houthi movement's use of unmanned explosive boats in the Red Sea, while crude, demonstrated the concept against commercial shipping. A state-level actor with industrial-scale production capacity would present a qualitatively different challenge.

A 2025 RAND Corporation study modeled a scenario in which 500+ one-way attack drones were launched simultaneously against a dispersed coastal defense network. The study found that even with advanced air defenses, the defenders' interceptor inventory was exhausted before the drone waves were fully defeated — a result driven not by the sophistication of the drones but by their numbers and the cost asymmetry of interception.

The Defensive Calculus: Where Drones Favor the Defender

If the offensive implications are sobering, the defensive applications of unmanned systems offer a powerful counterweight — one that disproportionately benefits the side defending a island position with interior lines.

Persistent maritime surveillance. Taiwan's greatest intelligence challenge is maintaining awareness of PLAN force movements across a 130-kilometer strait. Fleets of low-cost maritime surveillance drones — both aerial and surface — can provide 24/7 coverage that is far more survivable and cost-effective than manned patrol aircraft. If one drone is shot down, the next is already airborne. The information advantage this provides — early warning of amphibious fleet assembly and departure — is potentially decisive.

Anti-ship swarming. An amphibious invasion fleet is the highest-value, most vulnerable target set in modern warfare: dozens of large, slow, heavily loaded vessels that cannot easily maneuver or disperse. Taiwan has reportedly accelerated development of indigenous attack drones specifically designed for maritime strike — small, radar-evading platforms that can be launched in salvos from mobile land-based launchers. A 2024 report from Taiwan's National Defense University estimated that a force of 1,000 maritime attack drones, at a total program cost of approximately $200 million, could achieve the equivalent anti-ship capability of a destroyer flotilla costing $8-10 billion.

Mine warfare augmentation. Autonomous UUVs can deploy, monitor, and reposition sea mines with a speed and precision that manned platforms cannot match. For a defender seeking to mine the approaches to suitable landing beaches — of which Taiwan has fewer than 14, per established military geography assessments — unmanned mine-laying platforms transform static minefields into adaptive, responsive defensive networks.

Decoy and deception. Perhaps the least appreciated defensive application: cheap drones as decoys. A $500 drone with the radar cross-section signature of a patrol boat forces an adversary to expend targeting resources — satellite bandwidth, ISR aircraft, anti-ship missiles — on phantoms. Multiply this by hundreds, and the attacker's kill chain becomes overwhelmed with false targets.

The Ukraine Laboratory

The war in Ukraine has provided the most extensive real-world data on drone warfare since the technology's inception. The lessons are being studied intensely in both Taipei and Beijing — and they point in ambiguous directions.

Ukraine's naval drone program is perhaps the most directly relevant case study. Using unmanned surface vessels costing approximately $250,000 each, Ukraine has damaged or destroyed Russian naval vessels worth billions — including, reportedly, contributing to the degradation of Russia's Black Sea Fleet to the point where it withdrew from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk. A non-naval power effectively achieved sea denial against a nominally superior fleet through unmanned systems.

The parallel to Taiwan's situation is imperfect but instructive. Taiwan, like Ukraine, faces a numerically superior naval adversary across a body of water. Taiwan, like Ukraine, has a strong technology sector capable of rapid drone production. And Taiwan, like Ukraine, would benefit disproportionately from systems that impose costs on an invasion fleet without requiring manned platforms to survive in a contested environment.

The Ukrainian experience has also demonstrated the speed of adaptation in drone warfare. Electronic warfare countermeasures that defeated a drone model in January were overcome by firmware updates in March. Jamming frequencies were circumvented by autonomous navigation. Anti-drone systems that worked against one threat vector failed against the next. The cycle of measure and countermeasure compressed from years to weeks.

For a Taiwan contingency, this suggests that the side with the faster innovation cycle — not the larger starting inventory — may hold the decisive advantage in unmanned warfare. Taiwan's semiconductor expertise and advanced electronics manufacturing base are directly relevant here.

The Counter-Drone Problem

Every revolution invites a counter-revolution. The proliferation of military drones has triggered a parallel race in counter-drone systems — and the results, so far, are mixed at best.

Current counter-drone approaches fall into four categories:

The honest assessment: no military currently possesses a counter-drone capability adequate to defeat a determined, large-scale drone attack by a state-level adversary. This is a temporary condition — directed energy and AI-enabled interception will eventually shift the balance — but in the near-to-medium term planning window (2026-2032), the offense holds the advantage.

The AI Dimension

The variable that transforms unmanned systems from a quantitative challenge to a qualitative revolution is artificial intelligence. And in this domain, the competition between the United States and China is particularly intense.

Autonomous target recognition — the ability of a drone to identify, classify, and engage a target without human input — is the capability that converts a drone from a remotely piloted tool into an autonomous weapon. China has demonstrated this capability in controlled tests. The GJ-11 stealth combat drone is reported to incorporate autonomous target engagement modes. The PLA's "loyal wingman" program, pairing manned fighters with autonomous drone escorts, has been in flight testing since at least 2023.

The US Department of Defense's Replicator initiative, announced in 2023 with the explicit goal of fielding "autonomous systems at scale of multiple thousands, in multiple domains, within 18 to 24 months," reflects Washington's recognition that the unmanned competition is as much about production speed and AI integration as it is about individual platform capability.

For the Taiwan Strait specifically, the AI factor introduces a scenario that was previously theoretical: autonomous engagement in a communications-denied environment. In a major conflict, both sides would aggressively jam each other's communications and data links. Drones that depend on remote control become useless. Drones with autonomous navigation and target engagement capability continue to function. The side with more capable AI — not just more capable hardware — gains a structural advantage.

Force Structure Implications

The unmanned revolution is forcing a fundamental reassessment of optimal force structures for both the potential attacker and defender in a Taiwan scenario.

For Taiwan: The logic of asymmetric defense — already embraced in the "porcupine strategy" — is amplified by unmanned systems. Every dollar spent on large, manned surface combatants that are vulnerable to mass drone attack is arguably a dollar better spent on thousands of small, expendable, autonomous platforms. Taiwan's 2025 defense budget allocated approximately $1.6 billion to indigenous drone development programs — a significant increase from prior years, but still a fraction of overall defense spending. The opportunity cost of legacy platform procurement is real.

For the United States: The implications are equally profound. The US Navy's Task Force 59, established in 2021 to integrate unmanned systems in the Fifth Fleet area of operations, has demonstrated that a mesh network of small unmanned vessels can provide maritime domain awareness comparable to manned patrols at a fraction of the cost. Scaling this concept to the Western Pacific — where distances are greater and threat density is higher — is a stated priority of the Navy's Navigation Plan 2024.

For China: The PLA's numerical advantage in unmanned systems is counterbalanced by the fundamental challenge all attackers face: drones alone cannot hold territory. An amphibious invasion ultimately requires boots on ground — soldiers, vehicles, and supplies delivered by large, manned ships that are exquisitely vulnerable to the very unmanned systems China is building. The irony is structural: China's drone expertise makes defending Taiwan cheaper while simultaneously making its own invasion plans more expensive.

The Production War

In a protracted conflict — or even in the preparation phase — unmanned systems transform warfare into an industrial competition as much as a tactical one. Drones are consumed in combat at rates that dwarf any previous category of military equipment. Ukraine loses an estimated 10,000 drones per month. In a Taiwan contingency, the figure could be orders of magnitude higher.

China's manufacturing base gives it an obvious advantage in raw production capacity. DJI alone — a single company — produces more drones annually than all Western military drone programs combined. The ability to convert civilian manufacturing capacity to military drone production represents a mobilization advantage that is difficult to counter through military spending alone.

However, production volume is not the only metric. Component supply chains — particularly for advanced chips, sensors, and AI processors — introduce vulnerabilities. Many of the most capable military drone subsystems depend on semiconductors that are, at present, manufactured predominantly in Taiwan and by firms using equipment subject to US export controls. The recursive irony — that the chips enabling drone warfare may come from the island those drones would be used to attack — is not lost on strategic planners.

What the Models Show

Recent wargaming has begun incorporating unmanned systems at realistic scale, and the results suggest that drones do not eliminate the fundamental challenges of a cross-strait invasion — but they do compress timelines and raise costs on both sides.

The Center for a New American Security (CNAS) ran a series of tabletop exercises in 2024-2025 that included large-scale drone operations. Key findings:

The net assessment: unmanned systems raise the cost of aggression while simultaneously complicating the defense. They do not change the fundamental geographic and logistical realities of a 130-kilometer opposed amphibious crossing. But they do make the outcome more dependent on industrial capacity, technological agility, and the pace of innovation — domains where the competition is far more open than the manned-platform comparison suggests.

The Window of Adaptation

The unmanned revolution is not a future scenario. It is happening now, in real time, in the waters and airspace of the Western Pacific. Every month brings new deployments, new capabilities, new operational concepts tested against adversary responses.

For the defense establishment in Taipei, the imperative is clear: investment in unmanned systems — both offensive and defensive — represents the highest-leverage spending available. Drones are the great equalizer in asymmetric warfare, allowing a smaller force to impose costs on a larger one at ratios that no conventional platform can match.

For the broader Indo-Pacific security architecture, the drone revolution demands a reassessment of what "adequate deterrence" looks like. Counting ships and aircraft without accounting for the unmanned dimension produces a balance-of-power assessment that is increasingly disconnected from operational reality.

The platforms are small. The budgets are modest. The strategic implications are enormous. And the window for adaptation — for all parties — is narrowing.

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