Tin Pak and Yu-cheng Chen
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is rapidly expanding its arsenal of high-power microwave (HPM) weapons as part of its broader strategy to achieve dominance in the electromagnetic spectrum. Recent breakthroughs—including the deployment of mobile-platform HPM systems—signal the PLA’s intent to integrate these capabilities into its asymmetric warfare toolkit, enabling disruption of adversary electronic systems.
HPM development in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is closely linked to its evolving doctrine of “cyber-electromagnetic space” warfare. The PLA’s emphasis on informatized warfare highlights HPM weapons as a bridge between kinetic and non-kinetic operations, targeting adversaries’ command, control, and communication infrastructure.
Strategic lessons from the Russia-Ukraine war and the PLA’s own military modernization agenda suggest that HPM capabilities could play a decisive role in future conflicts, including a Taiwan contingency. The PLA is likely to synchronize HPM strikes with cyberattacks to paralyze critical infrastructure, enabling rapid battlefield advantage. This trajectory poses new challenges for the U.S. and its regional allies seeking to protect their C4ISR networks against electronic disruption.
The PRC broke new ground in its high-powered microwave (HPM) technology this past year. At the Zhuhai Air Show in November 2024—a biennial expo that is a major platform for showcasing advances in the aerospace industry–the PLA showcased at least three novel HPM ground-based weapons. These reportedly included the newly designed anti-drone Hurricane 2000 and Hurricane 3000 model HPMs (Foreign Military Studies Office, February 26). The third HPM system was the FK-4000, an anti-drone platform capable of precision single-point attacks and intercepting drone swarms, according to its designer, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) (CASC, November 12, 2024). These new weapon systems build upon rapid improvements in HPM industrial-programming software and the development of mobile-platform HPM systems.
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