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The South China Sea’s contested islands could be transformed into autonomous, robotic fortresses, according to a defence proposal by the Chinese coastguard.
The plan, which was detailed in a Chinese-language journal supervised by the state-run China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation, envisions a maritime landscape defended by a coordinated swarm of machines instead of soldiers.
The proposal comes as Beijing seeks to neutralise the growing threat of low-cost drone swarms – the asymmetric weapon that has reshaped naval combat as traditional, human-led defences are increasingly vulnerable to 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 mapped out a future where islands are shielded by a seamless, multi-domain network of air, surface and underwater drones.
Details of their plan were highlighted in a paper published in July by the weapons industry and military technology journal Command Control & Simulation.


“In view of the current complex situation in the surrounding sea areas and the practical challenges of low-cost unmanned platform clustering defence, this paper studies the feasible path of uncrewed system defence,” the researchers wrote.
They proposed an uncrewed defence system based on a collaboration of surface, aerial and underwater drones along with “fixed nodes of islands and reefs”.
“The system can effectively improve perceptual redundancy, cross-domain coordination, rapid response and anti-destruction resilience under complex sea conditions, and provide theoretical reference and technical support for the safety maintenance of islands and reefs,” the paper said.
The authors noted that uncrewed warfare was profoundly reshaping naval combat, pointing to the war in Ukraine and Kyiv’s development of the Magura V5 maritime strike drone as an example.
“Ukraine has built an asymmetric warfare force with uncrewed surface vessels such as the Magura V5 to strike the Russian fleet in a low-cost clustered manner. This has clearly exposed the vulnerability of traditional large manned ships to uncrewed cluster attacks,” they wrote.
Real-world combat showed that under saturation swarm attacks, traditional “linear kill chains suffer from long response links and vulnerability at single points”, the researchers added.
They said for islands and reefs – where narrow passages limit troop deployments and create major detection blind spots – the rapid evolution of adversary swarm capabilities challenged traditional manned defence methods, including early warning, cost-effectiveness and the sustainability of combat capability.
“Rapid global advances in uncrewed technologies provide the foundation to realise uncrewed confrontation and defence,” the team said, pointing to Chinese testing of surface, aerial and underwater drones in the northern part of the South China Sea in July last year.
Guided by US Air Force Colonel John Boyd’s decision-making model of “observe, orient, decide and act”, the researchers’ proposed framework reconstructs the “traditional linear kill chain” into a “closed-loop defence mechanism for island-reef uncrewed systems”.




According to the paper, while traditional defence systems process these four steps in a single sequence, the team’s system redistributes tasks so that even if certain nodes are destroyed, the remaining assets maintain defensive integrity.
The first stage of observation would be driven by a wide-area surveillance network, with aerial drones sweeping broad sections of airspace to detect incoming threats, the researchers said.
At the same time, uncrewed surface vehicles would be looking into low-altitude blind spots while their underwater counterparts monitored the area’s shallow channels and reef slopes.
In the “orient and decide” stages of the strategy, the information gathered would be merged to assess threat levels while artificial intelligence (AI) chips, installed on individual platforms, analysed local conditions.
This step would ensure that if communications were limited, the uncrewed vehicles would still be able to operate, the researchers explained.
In the final stage of the framework, uncrewed defences would be deployed across three spatial rings based on the geography of the location, they said.
In the outermost ring of an island or reef, reconnaissance-strike uncrewed aerial vehicles and high-speed surface drones would launch missiles or torpedoes at threats, according to the paper.
In the middle ring, electronic warfare based on uncrewed surface vehicles and aerial drones would be used to disrupt enemy decision-making. Any threats reaching the inner ring would be destroyed by close-in defence uncrewed surface vehicles, suicide drones and uncrewed underwater vehicles.
“Future efforts should test land, sea and air uncrewed swarm collaboration in real marine environments, advance technologies in cross-domain communication, AI decision-making and energy security,” the researchers wrote.
They also called to “deepen military-civilian integration to protect sovereignty and counter uncrewed threats with uncrewed capabilities”.
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Paper details autonomous defence system of air, sea and underwater drones to counter growing threat of uncrewed swarm attacks


Paper details autonomous defence system of air, sea and underwater drones to counter growing threat of uncrewed swarm attacks.


Chinese coastguard proposes turning South China Sea isles into robotic fortress

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Paper details autonomous defence system of air, sea and underwater drones to counter growing threat of uncrewed swarm attacks

Paper details autonomous defence system of air, sea and underwater drones to counter growing threat of uncrewed swarm attacks