China’s Expansion of Dual-Use Drones in Military Strategy

In recent years, the war in Ukraine has served as an online classroom for most of the world’s leading militaries, offering a front-row seat to emerging tactics, next-gen technologies, and a glimpse into the future of warfare.

Among those paying close attention is China, which has been carefully monitoring the conflict, particularly the pivotal role of dual-use unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in shaping the course of combat. Even with overwhelming air and artillery dominance, the Russian invasion underscored that modern offensives still resemble World War I–style trench warfare, as both sides struggle to advance and seize enemy ground.

This change in the character of war has accelerated the use of dual-use multirotor UAVs, especially in offensive operations, such as flying over trench lines to deliver explosive payloads. The growing impact of these systems was once again demonstrated during Ukraine’s recent Operation Spiderweb, which inflicted an estimated $7 billion in damage on Russia’s strategic air assets. (Mazhulin et al., 2025).

With such military developments happening in Ukraine, China is aiming not to be left behind. In recent years, China has significantly advanced its development and production of dual-use unmanned aerial systems (UAS), leveraging state-led industrial policy and civil-military fusion—where civilian technologies like drones are rapidly adapted for military use to achieve dominance across both commercial and military drone sectors.

The strategic integration of drone technologies has expanded Beijing’s military capabilities while also enhancing its global influence through export markets and supply chain control.

This drone diplomacy has allowed China to have a less noticeable but strong voice in regional conflicts such as in the Ukraine war. The decision to block drone sales to Ukraine but not to Russia had significant consequences on the conflict, allowing it to be the decision-maker in which side shall have the upper hand.

For those questioning why the drone export restrictions are so significant, it is important to understand the Chinese monopoly in this industry. The drones used in Ukraine are primarily produced by the Chinese company DJI, which should come as no surprise given that it controls around 70 percent of the global commercial drone market (GlobeNewswire, 2025).

In fact, China dominates approximately 80 percent of the global commercial drone supply overall (Kroenig and Bayoumi, 2024). Just in Shenzhen, which covers 70% of Chinese drone production alone, hosts over 1,300 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-related companies, presenting the sheer size of the country's production capacity (Liu, 2023). Especially in a conflict where drones have caused 70% of the battlefield casualties on both sides, the limitation of drones is a game-changer (Santora et al., 2025).

It’s worth noting that dedicating R&D spending exclusively to military applications can be an expensive delinquency, a financial obligation incurred today without any immediate peacetime return, for many countries, since expanding military capabilities yields no direct economic benefit when conflict is absent.

Furthermore, as in peacetime, the production is not needed in a continuous cycle like civilian markets; for many of the weapons systems, there is not a continuous demand, which limits the productions to individual orders to meet required stock targets. This, while making the productions more irregular and limited, causes hikes in prices, limited entry options for startups, and reduced production capacity.

Potential China-US wargames organized by CSIS show how US production capacity limitations in that regard pose a great risk in a future conflict (Jones, 2023). Dual-use military technologies generally tend to avoid these issues regarding production limitation and price hikes, allowing nations to be better and more economically prepared for future conflicts.

In recent years, the practice of dual-use technologies has also gained broader recognition within China’s military decision-makers. There is definitely a new understanding in Chinese strategic thinking that drones originally designed for commercial purposes can be rapidly repurposed for military applications. This awareness has driven growing investment to further build up its manufacturing capabilities.

The scale of China’s commitment to drone technology becomes evident when the growth of this market is examined. The surge in research and development of these technologies driven by both state and private investment-underscores how seriously China takes dual-use drone technology.

According to a report from Zero Power Intelligence Group, a Chinese industry research firm, China's drone market is projected to grow steadily from 2024 to 2029, exceeding 600 billion yuan by 2029, with a compound annual growth rate of 25.6 percent throughout this period (Guo, 2025). It has also been stated that drones are now being used increasingly in labor-intensive tasks, from construction assistance to desertification control (Guo, 2025).

This expansion serves multiple purposes: It not only boosts civilian expertise in drone operations but also scales up cost-effective production capacity—capabilities that could be swiftly redirected toward military needs in a conflict with minimal conversion effort.

The Military-Civil Fusion strategy that the Chinese president has been pioneering has enabled rapid development of drone platforms around the country with both commercial and military applications. MCF facilitates technology sharing between private firms, academia, and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), blurring the line between civilian innovation and defense production (U.S. Department of State, 2020).

The dual-use nature of drones also allows China to reduce training costs for military pilots, as the commercial market produces a large number of qualified drone operators. By the end of 2023, there were 929,000 registered drone users in China, according to data from the Civil Aviation Administration (Sixth Tone, 2023). While the registration does not mean that the person will automatically be able to use a drone, it is likely to reduce the training process necessary to adapt to the military drone operator environment.

Today, when policymakers try to assume the next conflict that China will play an active role in, they mainly think of the potential conflict over Taiwan Island as likely to be the main focus. While this is the case, the war is more likely to be conducted more actively with propeller suicide drones especially, as we see in the conflict between Israel and Iran. While this may cause doubts about the militarily game-changing aspect of quadcopter drones, it is important to take into consideration that, unlike today’s Israel-Iran conflict, the end goal in a Taiwan scenario brings in the aspect of a land invasion. The fact that China is developing and testing new amphibious assault barges with extended ramps is creating greater assumption of a land invasion plan (Jones, 2023).

When talking about the changes that the Ukraine war brings to modern warfare, it is impossible to skip AI. As the Ukraine war demonstrates, AI's battlefield value lies in processing overwhelming data flows.

With both sides employing AI to synthesize intelligence from disparate sources (Bendett, 2023), Chinese strategists are actively implementing similar systems. Their approach is both comprehensive and targeted: Recent years have seen China develop AI technologies to integrate multi-source data into actionable intelligence, seeking supremacy in vulnerability detection.

Additionally, AI is being applied to missile guidance, target identification, electronic warfare, and decision-making processes (Bresnick, 2024). This system reflects the PLA’s broader strategy of developing “dynamic kill networks” through AI, cloud computing, and big data, under the guidance of the emerging network information system allowing minimal human input (Graham and Singer, 2025).

This use of AI to enhance drone strike capabilities was clearly demonstrated in the recent Ukrainian Operation Spiderweb attack, where AI served as a fallback mechanism to adapt to jamming and signal loss during the mission, as stated by the Ukrainian Security Service. The military-grade AI enabled the drones to continue their missions autonomously along a preplanned route in the event of signal loss. This allowed them to stay on course toward their designated targets and detonate automatically upon arrival, even without operator input (Politico, 2025).

This case shows how AI is capable of making drones considerably more durable against external disruption like jamming and connection loss, which is currently among the most critical challenges.

China is making significant progress in AI-driven swarm drone technology, which outperforms single drones through real-time coordination. By enabling instant data sharing among units, the swarm can autonomously adjust its tactics without human intervention (Curtis and De Luca-Baratta, 2025). This boosts the combat effectiveness of the military while minimizing manpower needs.

While these highly developed AI systems are being produced, it is important to take into account that the modification of average Chinese commercial drones to high-end military drones would bring a number of challenges.

Commercial drones inherently lack the hardened cybersecurity protections, military-grade encryption, and processing power necessary for survivability in contested electromagnetic environments. Their vulnerability to electronic warfare and limited autonomous decision-making capabilities would likely render them ineffective against peer adversaries.

To solve these limitations, China could integrate commercial drones into its military AI ecosystem by retrofitting them with modular upgrades such as military-grade sensors, encrypted mesh networking, and lightweight AI co-processors. While these repurposed drones would lack the survivability of dedicated military systems against advanced adversaries, AI-powered features like autonomous jamming resistance and self-organizing mesh networks could still make them very effective in less contested areas or asymmetric warfare scenarios. By combining large numbers of AI-augmented commercial drones with a smaller contingent of high-end military drones, China could adopt a hybrid approach to swarm warfare, balancing scalability with combat effectiveness.

The growth of China’s dual-use drone sector represents a strategically significant development in global security. Its scale, diversity, and integration across civilian and military domains provide Beijing with a potent asymmetric capability that challenges Western technological and industrial superiority.

Written by Baran Ayguven

Geopolitical Analyst, Aries Intelligence

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Image source: CCTV-7 broadcast, April 2024, featuring PAP Heilongjiang Corps drone training exercise. Retrieved and republished via DroneXL.co.