China is menacing Taiwan with a drone swarm attack — and the US is playing catch-up

• China is menacing Taiwan with the threat of invasion.
• A military strike on the US ally could involve a vast drone attack.
• Taiwan and the US must boost the island’s capacity to fight drone swarms, say analysts.

In the early hours of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the narrow strait separating the island from the mainland would likely be transformed into a ferocious battlefield. 

But it’s not just traditional weapons, such as missiles or warships, that will dominate the scene.

Vast fleets of unmanned aerial and naval drones will likely darken the skies and hide beneath waves, bringing with them a deadly threat that Taiwan and its allies are ill-prepared to counter.

Creating a ‘Hellscape’

Drones could be deployed by China to swarm over Taiwan and guide high-precision missile strikes, experts told Business Insider.

One way to counter China’s assumed strategy is a US plan called “Hellscape,” Adm. Samuel Paparo, the head of US Indo-Pacific Command, told The Washington Post.

This involves filling the Taiwan Strait, which separates the island from the mainland, with thousands of unmanned submarines, unmanned surface ships, and aerial drones.

“I want to turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape using a number of classified capabilities,” Paparo told the publication. “So that I can make their lives utterly miserable for a month, which buys me the time for the rest of everything.”

But it’s a situation in which the US military and Taiwan are playing catch-up.

China, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory, is one of the world’s leading drone manufacturers, giving the People’s Liberation Army a clear advantage in any head-to-head drone confrontation. Taiwan and the US would be on the back foot.

“The military and commercial drone industrial base in both nations is quite weak,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, an analyst at the Center for a New American Security, of Taiwan and the US. 

Taiwan develops drone fleet to counter China’s 

If China’s nationalist leader Xi Jinping acts on his long-standing ambition to seize control of Taiwan, he’d seek to take out high-value US military and Taiwanese targets first.

China would likely initially seek to target key US military sites in the region in missile attacks, then deploy thousands of drones to surveil and help pinpoint further strikes.

“These drones could pass the target’s location to long-range artillery that can range Taiwan or ground-based ballistic and cruise missiles,” said Pettyjohn.

To counter China’s invasion, the US and Taiwan would have to deploy drone fleets of their own.

Chinese landing vessels transporting troops to the shore of Taiwan would be uniquely vulnerable to a drone attack, Zak Kallenborn, a drone technology analyst, told BI. 

“China likely would have to launch numerous amphibious forces to land on and secure a hold on the island. Those forces are likely to be vulnerable during transit, especially to overwhelming numbers of unmanned vehicles,” he said.

“Think about the famous picture of landing ships on D-Day. The soldiers are packed butt-to-butt with no overhead cover. A single, small drone-dropped explosive would blow them apart.”

Surveillance drones could also be used to “find Chinese landing forces” and to target them with weapons such as artillery or long-range missiles, added Pettyjohn, while small first-person view drones could be used “like kamikazes as a strike weapon to prevent the Chinese troops from being able to reorganize after making it ashore.”

Numbers count

But countering China’s drone capability is in part a numbers game, and this is where Taiwan and the US currently fall short. 

China produces millions of drones annually, with Chinese firm DJI accounting for around 70% of the global market, according to the Financial Times. When combined with other Chinese drone companies, that share goes up to well above 80%, it said.

Taiwan has struggled to produce its own version of the long-range Predator drones used by the US military, the Teng Yun, said Pettyjohn, and urgently needs to diversify its supply of commercial drones and their components to reduce its dependence on Chinese manufacturers.

“Taiwan has a few other classes of smaller military drones, but not nearly in the numbers that would be needed to defeat China,” said Pettyjohn.

To this end, US military companies are increasing cooperation with firms in Taiwan.

The New York Times reported in September that US and Taiwanese government officials met in Philadelphia to discuss ways to coordinate drone production and enhance the independence of their supply chains. But experts believe efforts need to ramp up.

In March, the US Army requested $2.4 billion for the development of unmanned aircraft systems and more than $400 million for counter-drone tech in its fiscal 2025 budget request.

Weeks later, Adm. John Aquilino, the leader of the Indo-Pacific Command, warned the House Armed Services Committee that China had increased its overall defense budget by 16% to more than $223 billion.

Enhanced air defense systems needed

Spurred by lessons in Ukraine, military planners in the US are focusing on new ways to shoot drones down or neutralize them. 

Both Russian and Ukrainian forces have deployed electronic warfare units to disable drones, scrambling the signals used to navigate the devices.

This method would be vital for tracking and disabling some of the smaller drones China might use in an attack on Taiwan, said Pettyjohn. 

But such defences are useless for more sophisticated drones, with both the US and Chinese militaries developing models resistant to electronic warfare interference. 

“The United States, China, and other states around the world are rapidly aiming to develop autonomous drones that do not need such input. If we can master that technology, electronic warfare will be less central to the drone space,” said Kallenborn. 

Conventional air defense systems capable of shooting drones from the sky would be needed to eliminate more sophisticated models. But in this area as well, said Pettyjohn, Taiwan is deficient. 

“Currently the US and Taiwan do not have sufficient air defenses and CUAS [counter drone] systems to deal with the Chinese drone threat,” she said. 

Another issue is geographical distance. The US would have to get enough drones to Taiwan quickly enough to make a difference and replace the large numbers that’d likely be destroyed in a conflict.

Much is at stake. As BI previously reported, in its Global Peace Index 2023, the Institute for Economics and Peace estimated that a Chinese blockade of Taiwan would result in a $2.7 trillion loss in world economic activity in the first year alone, equivalent to a 2.8% decline in global GDP.

Bloomberg’s modeling, meanwhile, estimates that a total blockade of Taiwan and Western sanctions on China could result in a 5% worldwide GDP decline, with US GDP falling by 3.3% and China’s by 8.9%. 

In the end, Kallenborn said, the ability to produce enough drones in sufficient numbers to be decisive will be key to how much devastation China can inflict.

“We’ve seen in Ukraine that major drone warfare requires major production capabilities to sustain the heavy losses,” he said.

“The US and Taiwan absolutely should be and are developing production capabilities, though no doubt more can be done.”