The proposal comes as Beijing seeks to neutralize the growing threat of low-cost drone swarms — an asymmetric weapon that has reshaped naval combat as conventional human-piloted defenses become increasingly vulnerable to unmanned air and surface fleets.
Researchers from the Department of Ship Command of the China Coast Guard Academy and the School of Marine Electrical Engineering at Dalian Maritime University have charted a future in which islands are protected by a multi-domain network of aerial, surface and underwater drones.
Details of their plan were highlighted in a research paper published in July by the arms industry and military technology journal Command Control & Simulation.
“In light of the current complex situation in the surrounding maritime regions and the practical challenges of low-cost unmanned cluster defense, this paper examines a possible path to unmanned system defense,” the researchers wrote.
