‘Saturation attacks’: drone swarms key for wartime victory, Chinese military paper says

The key to achieving wartime victory through expendable drones lies in “saturation attacks based on numerical superiority”, the official paper of the People’s Liberation Army has said as the Chinese military speeds up its development of unmanned systems.

In a commentary on Tuesday titled “Exploring the Winning Formula for Unmanned Attrition Warfare”, the PLA Daily said that it would be imperative to “flexibly deploy low-cost unmanned systems to continuously deplete the opponent’s high-value combat assets”.

This would allow the force to achieve “optimal combat effectiveness with minimal battlefield expenditure”, wrote the three authors, cited as Zhou Xiaoli, Zhang Changfang and Zhu Qichao.

Their institutional affiliations were not specified.

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The article said that by releasing large numbers of drones in concentrated formations, unmanned systems could “launch simultaneous operations across multiple domains and directions”, thereby “forcing the enemy into a state of exhaustion and passive defence”.

South China Morning Post