A war with China could drown US forces in drone swarms if it doesn’t gear up for the fight, new report warns

In a war with China, US forces could be overwhelmed by swarms of drones unless the military more aggressively invests in the systems needed to stop them, a new report warns.

The report, released Wednesday by the Center for a New American Security, argues that while the Pentagon has long talked about the need for counter-drone technologies, it has failed to prioritize them at scale, risking leaving troops vulnerable in a high-end fight.

The Defense Department, now the Department of War, has pushed drones, uncrewed capabilities, and counter-drone defenses as a priority; however, efforts “have been hindered by insufficient scale and urgency,” report authors Stacie Pettyjohn, director of CNAS’ defense program, and Molly Campbell, a research assistant, argued.

Rival China, on the other hand, has been pouring its resources into developing uncrewed systems, especially small one-way attack drones, while also developing more advanced capabilities. In 2024, Beijing ordered one million one-way attack drones for delivery by 2026, signaling both the intent and capacity to mass-produce drones at significant levels.

“Without deep magazines of substantially enhanced counter-drone capabilities, the United States risks having its distributed warfighting strategies overwhelmed by massed Chinese drone attacks, and the United States could lose a war over Taiwan,” Pettyjohn and Campbell wrote in their new report.

Not enough speed or scale

The Pentagon has spent years and billions of dollars on counter-drone programs, with spending spikes after ISIS weaponized drones in the 2010s and again during the Ukraine war. In 2025, it plans to spend about $7.4 billion on counter-drone technologies alone.

Much of that money has gone to advanced kinetic weapons that cost far more per shot than the drones they are meant to destroy. The US Navy’s battles in the Red Sea highlighted this imbalance.

“All too often, US forces use exquisite precision-guided missiles worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars apiece to destroy cheap drones,” the CNAS report said. 

Other defenses, like directed-energy weapons using lasers or microwaves, have often remained costly prototypes that are stalled in research and development rather than operational systems, though some have been fielded.

Military leaders have acknowledged gaps in these efforts. Electronic warfare is widely seen as critical, but earlier this year, Gen. James Rainey, the head of Army Futures Command, criticized slow adoption and urged industry partners to stop promising “pieces of the puzzle” and instead deliver integrated solutions, what he called “a sum of those capabilities.”

The pace of progress has been slow, and the scale has so far been too limited. “While limited numbers of C-UAS systems have been acquired in response to these urgent operational needs, few have entered into full production and been fielded at scale,” Pettyjohn and Campbell wrote, referring to weapons that are able to counter uncrewed aerial systems.

Broad pushes in the Pentagon for drones and counter-drone systems have touched on integrating artificial intelligence and data to improve combat capacities, targeting, and decision-making. The CNAS report added that AI could greatly improve the target engagement process and also help US forces respond to larger, more complex drone attacks, but that remains a work in progress.

Massive Chinese drone swarms

The Pentagon faces major challenges as it prepares for the possibility of conflict with China. If war broke out, Beijing’s vast stockpile of drones and missiles could threaten US bases and forces positioned in the Indo-Pacific.

Mass production is central to China’s strategy. It dominates the drone market and can leverage the civil-military fusion between commercial and defense.

And China’s armed forces have been drawing lessons from Russia’s war in Ukraine, experimenting with first-person view drones, fiber-optic systems, long-range strike platforms, and advanced reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft. These have been featured more prominently in Chinese military exercises.

The US is also pursuing these systems, but China appears to be ahead. It may, as the CNAS report assessed, “soon have the largest and most sophisticated drone fleet in the world.”

In a wargame tabletop exercise completed by the CNAS defense team and detailed in the new paper, China was able to employ different types of drones to sustain attacks against US forces, especially within the first island chain, a strategic territorial arc that stretches from Japan through Taiwan to the Philippines.

The exercise showed that the US would need deeper stockpiles of layered, integrated counter-drone systems and sensors to defend dispersed forces. The report recommended investing in proven systems while building a complex web of active and passive defenses, since no single weapon can handle the full range of drone threats.

US commanders have also embraced the idea of meeting potential Chinese drones with swarms of their own. Adm. Samuel Paparo, head of US Indo-Pacific Command, said last year he wanted to be able to turn the Taiwan Strait “into an unmanned hellscape” with cheap, reliable drones that could overwhelm China’s forces and buy the US time in the event of an invasion or blockade.

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