Sean Tseng
On today’s battlefields, inexpensive flying robots are capable of locating, jamming, and eliminating targets faster than any human can react. China is determined to flood the skies with them.
In response, the United States is working on building its own swarms, refining smarter software, and tightening curbs on Chinese technology, while Ukraine’s front lines serve as a testing ground for evaluating effective and ineffective technologies.
The contest is not about a single “best drone,” an analyst told The Epoch Times. Instead, it’s a race between China’s ability to mobilize a huge civilian drone industry for war and America’s effort to turn clever prototypes into mass production, then bind them together with software and allied networks.
To prevail, the analyst said, Washington must move faster on approvals and testing, buy in large quantities, and adopt strategies proven effective on Ukraine’s battlefield on a larger scale, such as embracing open systems, facilitating quick upgrades, and shipping technology in the thousands.
Any future clash, especially over Taiwan, will be decided by scale, speed, and the lessons that endure from Ukraine, according to the analyst.
China’s Civil‑Military FusionChina’s consumer drone machine is enormous.
China delivered more than 3.17 million civilian drones in 2023, with more than 2,300 companies and at least 1,000 models in mass production, the vice minister of industry and information technology told a press conference in April 2024.
That ecosystem—anchored by Chinese company DJI, the world’s largest drone maker—feeds a low-cost parts chain of motors, optics, radios, and flight controllers that can pivot to military use almost overnight.
This illustrates the civil-military fusion strategy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): a state-guided process that transforms consumer dominance into wartime readiness.
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