China’s military is preparing for Ukraine-style drone war

China’s military is training and building hardware to fight the kind of drone war seen in Ukraine, from sea drone attacks to airfield raids, and its analysts typically write up a new battlefield technique within about four months of its first use, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The commentary, published on October 7 by Lilly Min-Chen Lee of Taiwan’s Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology and Kateryna Bondar of the CSIS Wadhwani AI Center, draws on more than 90 Chinese-language sources from 45 outlets published between July 2022 and August 2026. They include the Central Military Commission’s PLA Daily and peer-reviewed journals run by China’s state missile, shipbuilding and aviation conglomerates.

The authors found that China studies the war mainly from the position of a likely target. Its most detailed work comes from designers of air and harbor defenses, who treat Ukraine’s sea drones and airfield raids as previews of attacks China could face. Nearly half the sources appeared in publications run by defense industrial institutions, which feed lessons directly into their own requirements and procurement.

“The errors we make in trials are detours the troops will not have to take,” a participant at a PLA center that tests drone swarms against counter-drone defenses told Chinese state media, as quoted in the study.

On offense, Chinese writers have focused on cost and speed. The PLA Daily stated in March 2025 that a single reconnaissance-strike drone costs less than 1 percent of a modern fighter while covering more than 90 percent of its battlefield area, figures the authors describe as rough. Analysts at China’s National Defense University cited Russian forces striking a detected target within three to five minutes, using reconnaissance drones such as the Orlan-10 to cue Lancet and Kub loitering munitions.

The PLA Daily flagged Russia’s fiber-optic drones, which are steered through a thin cable that cannot be jammed, in May 2024, within weeks of their battlefield debut. By April 2025, Chinese state television showed a People’s Armed Police unit in Yunnan province training with first-person-view drones and researching fiber-optic models, about a year after Russia first used the technique.

The study’s deepest material concerns defense against attacks like Ukraine’s. A team from China’s Naval University of Engineering counted more than 10 large Russian naval vessels damaged by Ukrainian strikes and concluded that a sea drone offensive must be met by counter-sea drone equipment working as a system. In August 2025, the PLA Daily reported a missile-boat drill against approaching enemy unmanned boats, 35 months after the first Ukrainian sea drone washed ashore near Sevastopol. An Eastern Theater frigate flotilla held a live-fire drill against unmanned boats in April 2026, and Chinese army drones fired missiles at fast boats in exercises in July and August 2026.

Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web, the June 1, 2025 drone raid on Russian bomber bases launched from inside Russia, produced an even faster response. Within four and a half months, a PLA brigade defended against a drone attack team of more than 20 operators in an October 2025 exercise, using detection gear that identifies drones by their radio emissions and checks them against a catalog of more than 800 commercial models.

Chinese writers also adopted the war’s economics of defense, the authors said, citing a Global Times analysis of Ukraine’s interceptor drones.

“The cost of procuring one man-portable air-defense missile buys several hundred air-defense FPV drones,” the Global Times wrote.

Counter-drone weapons have moved into Chinese hardware faster than any other category, according to the study, from the Tianqiong system, Hurricane 3000 microwave weapon and LW-60 laser shown at the Zhuhai air show in November 2024 to the lasers and microwave weapons displayed at the September 2025 military parade.

The authors also found institutional changes. In May 2025, the Central Military Commission created three new military universities from existing academies, including an army combat arms university in Hefei, and new degree programs list unmanned systems command and control. A PLA unit’s tender on the military procurement website sought DJI Matrice enterprise drones and automated docks, despite Beijing’s official opposition to military use of civilian drones.

Some concepts remain unproven in Chinese eyes. In October 2024, China National Defense News asked why drone swarm warfare had produced “all thunder and little rain” in Ukraine, listing problems with flight control, communications, onboard intelligence, power and payload. The PLA is running its own swarm experiments to fill that gap.