Chinese coastguard proposes turning South China Sea isles into robotic fortress

According to a defense proposal by the Chinese coastguard, the contested islands in the South China Sea could be converted into autonomous robotic fortresses, as detailed in a Chinese-language journal. This plan envisions a fleet of unmanned machines defending the maritime landscape instead of human soldiers. The proposal aims to counter the growing threat of low-cost drone swarms, which have become a significant vulnerability in naval combat, as traditional human-led defenses are increasingly at risk from uncrewed aerial and surface fleets.

Researchers from the China Coast Guard Academy's ship command department and Dalian Maritime University's Marine Electrical Engineering College have outlined a system where islands are protected by a seamless network of air, surface, and underwater drones. Their paper, published in July, suggests that this uncrewed defense system based on the collaboration of surface, aerial, and underwater drones along with fixed nodes of islands and reefs could improve perceptual redundancy, cross-domain coordination, rapid response, and anti-destruction resilience in complex sea conditions.

The researchers highlighted the changing nature of naval combat, citing Ukraine's development of the Magura V5 maritime strike drone as an example of asymmetric warfare. They noted that traditional large manned ships are vulnerable to uncrewed cluster attacks, especially in narrow passages that limit troop deployments and create blind spots for detection.

The rapid advancement of uncrewed technologies provides the foundation for realizing uncrewed confrontation and defense, according to the team. The proposed framework, guided by US Air Force Colonel John Boyd's decision-making model, reconstructs the traditional linear kill chain into a closed-loop defense mechanism for island-reef uncrewed systems.

The system would involve observation, orienting, deciding, and acting, with information gathered from a wide-area surveillance network, aerial drones, and underwater vehicles. Based on the geography of the location, uncrewed defences would be deployed across three spatial rings, with reconnaissance-strike uncrewed aerial vehicles and high-speed surface drones protecting the outermost ring, electronic warfare disrupting enemy decision-making in the middle ring, and close-in defence uncrewed surface vehicles, suicide drones, and uncrewed underwater vehicles protecting the inner ring.