Chinese USV Development Thread

[Gloire_bb]

You are going down the rabbit hole a little.

Drones are giving the Russians a headache because they don’t have the right tools in sufficient numbers for the job sure, but also because geography and political reality is really not their friend in Ukraine and the Black Sea.

The problem for Russia was a complete lack of attention - they just considered it another guy's problem. And it was indeed another guys' problem, until Russia started a war with an industrial nation that didn't have any other choice...but had lots of advisors, who dealt with this exact problem firsthand.

The problem for PLA here is that PLAN almost equally considered it until recently ... anothers' guy's problem. But PLA enemies are industrial nations, which have advisors...you see the pattern. I.e. I think it's a given at this point that drone warfare will be tried against China. Moreover, given how EU and Ukraine develop gray area attacks (surely won't backfire against a group of nations without global presence), this threat can turn real against Chinese shipping sooner than even actual war can start.

Like, for example, how much COIN/C-UAS gun mounts do PLA ships have? They do, in fact, have some (H/PJ-17 on 056(A)), but those apparently weren't terribly successful, as half the production run switched to a manual 14.5 MG instead.
Since then, nothing, assumption (much like Russia tbh) apparently is that "we already have 30mm at home".

Yes, i agree that maybe I'm overly impressed by what's happening. But this isn't just me being impressed; decision-makers are sold on that, too, even if they're desperate/incopetent and are absolutely getting fooled (Gulf contracts with Ukraine).
But fools or not, money and spread come to the issue.

 

[plawolf]

The problem for Russia was a complete lack of attention - they just considered it another guy's problem. And it was indeed another guys' problem, until Russia started a war with an industrial nation that didn't have any other choice...but had lots of advisors, who dealt with this exact problem firsthand.

The problem for PLA here is that PLAN almost equally considered it until recently ... anothers' guy's problem.

I don’t think anyone could reasonably conclude that the PLA isn’t taking drone warfare seriously. In fact, I would say the PLA is the national military that is developing drone warfare capabilities the most out of all nations, including Ukraine even.

What the Ukrainians are doing now, the PLA played around with over a decade ago based on released old training footage.

Granted the PLA didn’t take FPVs as far as the Ukrainians, but that’s more down to China simply having much better options to go with rather than because they didn’t accept that that is the general direction warfare is moving towards. Hence the PLA’s new fascination with putting loitering munitions on pretty much everything and the catalogue of drones of all shapes and sizes popping up at expos.

Similarly, I think the PLA is much further along on counter drone warfare than the west, because the obvious question after getting all their fancy new drones would have been, how do you fight against that? Which is basically embedded into modern PLA training and strategic thinking owing to the regular force-on-force competition that are now standard practice throughout the PLA.

It’s from these exercises and live fire tests that the PLA has rapidly moved past 30mm rotary cannon towards higher cal smart munitions and micro-interceptor missiles to directed energy weapons like lasers and microwaves.

From observable data, it doesn’t appear that the PLAN has reiterated its systems as many times or as rapidly as the PLA ground forces. But as I pointed out before, they actually have a lot of options and tools to handle the threat with what they are installing on their ships right now, so it’s unclear if that is down to inattention, different threat assessments, better forward planning, or just that changes were not observable if it revolves around back-end changes or munitions changes that are just not observable without actual use. Hell, how do we know that they haven’t tested their warships against drone swarm attacks and found that the EW and AESA radars the warships have as standard were sufficiently powerful to simply f

But PLA enemies are industrial nations, which have advisors...you see the pattern. I.e. I think it's a given at this point that drone warfare will be tried against China.

Industrial nations whose critical supply chains are all centred on China. If China simply stopped exporting critical components and raw materials, how many drones could the collective west pump out before they literally run out of core components and cannot make any more?

Moreover, given how EU and Ukraine develop gray area attacks (surely won't backfire against a group of nations without global presence), this threat can turn real against Chinese shipping sooner than even actual war can start.

Grey zone attacks are like alpha strikes. It can be devastating, but you can only try it once against a competent opponent. And besides, the best defence against such attacks is intelligence, just as America didn’t respond to 9/11 by trying to install CIWS on every skyscraper.

 

[Gloire_bb]

I don’t think anyone could reasonably conclude that the PLA isn’t taking drone warfare seriously. In fact, I would say the PLA is the national military that is developing drone warfare capabilities the most out of all nations, including Ukraine even.

In general - yes. In terms of navy COIN/C-UAS procurement strategy, sadly, I beg to differ.

Neither mission is absolutely new, and is overall embraced by Western navies since the 1980s, but especially since the USS Cole bombing.
The US Navy has tried several classes of specialized anti-swarm combatants (LCS ASuW/SEWIP; Constellation; FFX) and weapons. Even smaller NATO navies have dedicated classes (Royal Navy - Type 31/Wildcat; BM - F125) or adapted entire navies (Italian MM) to the threat.

Still, as practice shows, they're nowhere near enough - when there is actual swarming/jeune école power, even the US Navy itself keeps clear, and allies chickened out.

When we examine PLAN ships, absolutely nothing visible was done before the war (except for the above-mentioned 30mm guns, on a ship that cannot accommodate normal 30s; so it's up for debate whether even that was a sign of anything), whether it be modern combat ship classes, aircraft, or weapons.

The only thing we saw was ad hoc(!) jammers for port calls.

China as a nation, and other branches of the PLA (especially PLAGF), appear quite drone-aware, benefitting strongly from observing drone war at its very heart(manufacturing). And PLAN certainly does drones, and does a lot ... but it does pre-war unmanned boat plans. And does almost nothing visible against them.
There's one exception - new powerful "jumping spider" lasers from VJ parade...but this is 2025, parade and not on ships.

Granted, there are invisible parts (which are more important than visible), but I honestly can't share your optimism: too much of C-UAS is visible by default.

On almost all modern PLA combatants(052D, 054B, 055), there's 1 really effective anti-drone weapon, which comes off the shelf: the main gun. All of them dropped 2x CIWS setup in favour of HHQ-10 + 1x CIWS(+a larger caliber main gun, which is a downgrade for the mission)...both in front, which both leave a significant dead zone and reduce available self-defense capability further still.
The only exception is the 056A force, and only part of it.

 

[Blitzo]

In general - yes. In terms of navy COIN/C-UAS procurement strategy, sadly, I beg to differ.

Neither mission is absolutely new, and is overall embraced by Western navies since the 1980s, but especially since the USS Cole bombing.
The US Navy has tried several classes of specialized anti-swarm combatants (LCS ASuW/SEWIP; Constellation; FFX) and weapons. Even smaller NATO navies have dedicated classes (Royal Navy - Type 31/Wildcat; BM - F125) or adapted entire navies (Italian MM) to the threat.

Still, as practice shows, they're nowhere near enough - when there is actual swarming/jeune école power, even the US Navy itself keeps clear, and allies chickened out.

When we examine PLAN ships, absolutely nothing visible was done before the war (except for the above-mentioned 30mm guns, on a ship that cannot accommodate normal 30s; so it's up for debate whether even that was a sign of anything), whether it be modern combat ship classes, aircraft, or weapons.

The only thing we saw was ad hoc(!) jammers for port calls.

China as a nation, and other branches of the PLA (especially PLAGF), appear quite drone-aware, benefitting strongly from observing drone war at its very heart(manufacturing). And PLAN certainly does drones, and does a lot ... but it does pre-war unmanned boat plans. And does almost nothing visible against them.
There's one exception - new powerful "jumping spider" lasers from VJ parade...but this is 2025, parade and not on ships.

Granted, there are invisible parts (which are more important than visible), but I honestly can't share your optimism: too much of C-UAS is visible by default.

On almost all modern PLA combatants(052D, 054B, 055), there's 1 really effective anti-drone weapon, which comes off the shelf: the main gun. All of them dropped 2x CIWS setup in favour of HHQ-10 + 1x CIWS(+a larger caliber main gun, which is a downgrade for the mission)...both in front, which both leave a significant dead zone and reduce available self-defense capability further still.
The only exception is the 056A force, and only part of it.

There's partly a reason for this phenomenon, and it's because the higher end, more conventional threats (AShMs) are ultimately still more salient -- both in terms of being a technical challenge to intercept, and in terms of presence/employment by potential adversaries.

Intercepting things like Shahed suicide drones or suicide USVs ultimately is a less challenging task than a proper AShM strike -- but one needs to first have an adversary that are pursuing such things at scale (i.e.: the military intelligence to forewarn of such systems in peacetime to enable countersystems to be implemented).


In a perfect world, all surface combatants of all navies in the world, would have 2-4 sets of smart fuzed autocannons with some small SAMs, that are optimized for both Shahed style suicide drones and suicide USVs in a manner which allows for relative economical defeat of such threats.

In reality, unless one expects an opponent to actually field such systems at scale, then they're not going to be installed and implemented at scale because existing systems (main DP gun, CIWS, HMGs) will be deemed good enough, especially if one has other supporting capabilities to degrade launch platforms (using fires/interdiction) and provide forewarning of the threat (AEWC, competent surface search radars), as well as the ability to avoid such situations to begin with (maneuver in a maritime space).