Drone Carriers – Reshaping Naval Power

Prologue

The unveiling of the Jiutian SS-UAV at the 2024 Zhuhai Airshow marked a new chapter in aerospace technology. It also represented a significant leap in China’s unmanned aerial capabilities. The drone was developed by the Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). They partnered with the private firm Jiutian. This High-Altitude, Long-Endurance (HALE) drone is a formidable platform. It has a reported takeoff weight of 15 to 18 tons. The wingspan measures 25 metres. Its cruising altitude is 15,000 metres. The drone boasts an operational range of 7,000 kilometres.

The Jiutian stands out due to its fusion of advanced technologies. It features AI-driven swarm control. It also includes quantum-encrypted communications. Moreover, it has a modular design that allows for exceptional versatility. This platform is at the forefront of an “intelligentised” approach to warfare. It poses a threat to the aircraft carrier’s century-long reign as the ultimate symbol of global power projection.

The critical advantage lies in the speed of deployment. An aircraft carrier strike group requires immense logistical support and significant transit time to project force across the globe. In contrast, Jiutian SS-UAVs can be launched from dispersed land bases or maritime platforms. This allows for a rapid concentration of force where it is needed most.

An Imaginary Glimpse into the Future

June 15, 2033. Dawn over the Taiwan Strait. At 05:30, the strait shimmered with dawn’s amber glow. Ten Jiu Tian-class airships, their radar-absorbing hulls cloaked by clouds at 50,000 feet, hovered as silent harbingers. Though designed for civilian surveillance, they concealed a lethal mission: a coordinated, AI-driven decapitation of Taiwan’s leadership. Below, Taipei pulsed with an unseen threat, a city interwoven with Chinese-manufactured 5G towers, smart grids, and autonomous vehicles poised to betray their hosts.

At 06:00, the attack began. A thousand autonomous drones descended like metallic locusts, their AI exploiting the digital sinews of Taiwan’s infrastructure. Huawei and ZTE 5G routers, embedded with dormant jamming subroutines, instantly severed military communications. Taipower smart metres, sourced from Chinese suppliers, triggered surgical overloads, plunging the Presidential Office and key defence nodes into darkness. At Songshan Air Base, a swarm of BYD electric taxis, their systems remotely overridden, flooded the runways, blocking the takeoff of F-16s. Three hundred strike drones, armed with aerosolised sedatives, hunted their targets with chilling precision. In a sealed bunker, Defence Minister Chen collapsed as the chemical agent streamed through a sabotaged vent. In the Legislative Yuan, Senator Lin’s smartwatch betrayed her location to a silent, circling drone. Across the island, pre-installed backdoors in CCTV cameras fed real-time targeting data, effortlessly evading Taiwan’s counter-drone jammers.

By 07:30, Taiwan’s command structure was faltering. Government transformers, built with embedded trip circuits, isolated critical facilities while cleverly sparing most of the civilian grid. Two hundred electronic warfare drones targeted the systems’ radars. They jammed the radars of the Sky Bow III and Patriot PAC-3. The attack exploited flaws in their imported components. Taiwan’s high-power microwave defences managed to disrupt 20% of the swarm, a valiant but insufficient effort. Offshore, PLA-linked cargo ships shed their civilian guise and severed subsea cables, slashing the nation’s bandwidth by 70%. In the presidential bunker, the Huawei-installed fibre-optic lines went dead, stranding the remnants of leadership.

At 08:00, the cognitive war began. Deepfake broadcasts, propagated via the compromised 5G towers, falsely declared the president’s death. AI-generated voice clips mimicking commanders sowed chaos and distrust. While Taiwan’s cybersecurity filters mitigated some of the disinformation, morale began to fracture. By 11:00, with resistance scattered, 10,000 PLA paratroopers landed near Taipei. IoT-linked traffic lights were reprogrammed to guide Taiwanese military and police into kill zones, where micro-drones swiftly neutralised their commanders. The port of Keelung fell as its own cranes were turned against it, and Songshan’s runways were cratered.

By 18:00, critical systems buckled. Water treatment plants, running on Chinese PLCs, began to dose chemicals erratically. In field hospitals, ventilators failed as their firmware locked. In his bunker, the Premier received an ultimatum: “Surrender or face obliteration.” At 22:00, under the incessant hum of drones, the ROC flag fell. Taipei was subdued.

Eight hundred nautical miles away, the USS Ronald Reagan was paralysed. A day earlier, on June 14, a subtle chaos had begun to unfold. What seemed like a routine flu outbreak quickly escalated. By noon, over 20% of the flight deck crew was incapacitated, suffering from fever, dizziness, and neurological confusion. The culprit was a synthetic bioweapon. It was a modified varicella-zoster orthopox hybrid. The bioweapon was delivered days earlier by a nano-drone. This drone was launched from a fishing vessel. Engineered to exploit immunological blind spots in adults, the virus induced acute vestibular dysfunction. It also caused memory blackouts. This rendered sailors non-combat-capable for up to 72 hours. With a self-limiting RNA kill switch, it was designed to leave no trace.

Medical teams were overwhelmed. Flight operations were suspended. The reactor was staffed at half-strength. The mighty USS Ronald Reagan is a $13 billion titan of American power. It was neutralised without a shot fired. It was reduced to a floating quarantine zone. It’s Aegis BMD systems, already strained by Dongfeng-26 missiles fed targeting data from compromised satellites, were rendered inert.

By sunrise on June 16, Taiwan’s fall signalled a new epoch of warfare. Trust in interconnected systems became a fatal vulnerability. The PLA’s doctrine of “intelligentised warfare” had reshaped the very nature of conflict.

The Twilight of Traditional Carriers 

For over a century, the aircraft carrier has been the ultimate arbiter of naval power. These 100,000-ton floating fortresses, with price tags exceeding $13 billion, have defined maritime supremacy. Yet, like the battleships they rendered obsolete, carriers now face an existential challenge. This challenge comes from a new class of weapon: the drone carrier.

Metric	Aircraft Carrier	Drone Carrier
Cost (Construction)	$10–13 billion	$1.5–3 billion
Crew Size	4,000–5,000	200–1,500
Survivability	High-risk target	Distributed, low signature
Strategic Flexibility	Limited to superpowers	Accessible to regional actors

Source: Congressional Research Service (2023), RAND Corporation (2025)

Warfare in 2040 and Beyond

The future of warfare lies in the seamless, AI-orchestrated integration of forces across air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace. In this networked environment, the calculus of military power shifts dramatically, especially when comparing manned and unmanned platforms.

Criteria	Traditional Manned Platforms (e.g., Aircraft Carriers)	Autonomous Platforms (e.g., Drone Carriers – Aerial & Maritime)
Operational Risk	High (Loss of high-value asset, significant human casualties, major political fallout).	Low (Expendable/attritable systems, reduced human exposure, less political fallout from losses).
Cost-Effectiveness (Acquisition & Operation)	Extremely High (Billions for platforms, high personnel & training costs, extensive support infrastructure). For example, a single Ford-class carrier costs $13.3B, with annual operating costs exceeding $300M, excluding the air wing and escorts.	Significantly Lower (Thousands to millions for individual units, lower personnel count, simpler logistics for attritable assets). While specific drone carrier costs are conceptual, they are projected to be significantly less than manned carriers.
Adaptability & Modularity	Limited by fixed platform designs, slow development cycles, and human-machine interface constraints. Slow to adapt to new aircraft/system types or mission profiles.	High. Rapid reconfiguration of drone payloads (ISR, EW, strike, loitering munitions) and integration of new drone designs. AI allows for dynamic mission adaptation.
Stealth & Survivability	Large radar/IR signatures, limited manoeuvrability for major platforms. Requires massive escort for defence. Highly vulnerable to advanced anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) weapons (e.g., hypersonic missiles)	Smaller, low-observable individual units. Distributed nature makes entire “force” harder to destroy (losing a few units doesn’t cripple the system). Many can operate outside direct threat zones or in highly dispersed formations.
Human Element/Cognitive Burden	High cognitive load on all personnel (pilots, commanders, analysts, maintenance). Human endurance limits dictate operational tempo and sortie rates.	AI handles complex swarm coordination. It performs real-time data analysis and autonomous decision-making. This reduces human cognitive burden to high-level oversight and strategic planning. Enables continuous operations . Cognitive Warfare
Network Reliance & Cyber Vulnerability	High for C2, navigation, targeting, and integrated combat systems. Susceptible to sophisticated cyber and EW attacks.	High for coordination and data links. However, robust offline autonomy, self-healing mesh networks, and quantum communications offer mitigation against disruption and denial. Control of the OSI stack key.
Escalation Management	Deployment of large manned forces (like an aircraft carrier) often signals high stakes, increasing risk of escalation. Loss of personnel carries severe political implications.	Use of attritable, unmanned systems allows for more flexible “grey zone” operations. They reduce political repercussions from losses. This offers more tools for de-escalation or limited engagement.
Technological Growth Potential	Limited by physical constraints and the slow, costly development cycle of manned platforms and hardware.	Exponential, driven by rapid advancements in AI algorithms, processing power, materials science, and additive manufacturing. Software updates can dramatically enhance capabilities.

The “Swarm vs. Super carrier” Dilemma 

• The naval domain perfectly illustrates this paradigm shift. A single drone carrier, whether a surface vessel or a high-altitude airship, unleashes thousands of coordinated, attritable drones. Guided by advanced AI, these swarms can execute sophisticated tactics that render traditional defences obsolete.
• Saturation Attacks: Overwhelm a carrier’s defences with sheer numbers. A carrier expend millions of dollars in defensive missiles. This is to destroy a handful of drones that cost less than $1 million in total. This cost-exchange ratio is unsustainable.
• Multi-Spectrum Jamming: Simultaneously cripple a carrier’s radar, communications, and navigation systems from multiple vectors.
• Distributed ISR & Targeting: Form a vast sensor network to locate and track naval assets. It feeds the targeting data to long-range hypersonic or ballistic missiles.
• Kamikaze Strikes: Use drones as expendable munitions to disable critical systems, a tactic already proven effective in conflicts like the Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.

The rise of “mothership” concepts, where large, reusable UAVs deploy smaller, expendable drones, further enhances this flexibility. Aerial drone carriers can loiter at high altitudes for extended periods, providing a persistent threat far from traditional naval bases. China’s Jiu Tian, developed in just 18 months, embodies this new philosophy: distributed, autonomous, and AI-driven.

Strategic Implications and the Evolving Balance of Power

By 2040, drone carriers will likely dominate routine military operations. Traditional carriers will be relegated to niche roles within hybrid forces. The widespread adoption of autonomous systems will have profound strategic consequences:

Decentralisation of Power: The ability to field potent, AI-driven forces from smaller, cheaper platforms democratises military might. Nations lacking the resources for supercarriers can now challenge established powers, fostering a more multipolar world.

Redefining A2/AD: Autonomous systems can operate within and around anti-access/area denial zones with lower risk. This forces adversaries to develop entirely new and more costly countermeasures.

The Rise of Hybrid Forces: Manned platforms will not disappear but will evolve. They will serve as command nodes for vast autonomous fleets or be reserved for missions requiring nuanced human judgment. Their role will shift from primary strike asset to that of a specialised flagship.

The Primacy of Software: The “hardware race” to build bigger ships and faster jets will come to an end. It will be replaced by a “software race.” A nation’s military edge will depend on its mastery of AI, secure networking (Trusted & Resilient), and quantum computing. Data superiority will become as crucial as firepower.

Ethical and Legal Frontiers: The proliferation of autonomous weapons raises urgent moral questions. It also poses legal questions about accountability. There are concerns about escalation. Human control is another significant issue. International law will struggle to keep pace with technological advancement, creating a complex and dangerous grey area for military operations.

Multi Domain Warfare: The future battlefield, will involve weaponisation of the ICT infrastructure for intelligentised warfare. China has enacted several enabling legislations. These include the National Intelligence Law (2017), Cybersecurity Law (2017), and Data Security Law (2020). They serve as pointers in this direction. The US CLOUD Act (2018), FISA Act (1978), and the Snowden revelations also indicate this trend.

Conclusion

The era of military power defined by vast, crew-intensive platforms is drawing to a close. By 2040, autonomous systems will converge with economic pressures. The nature of multi-domain warfare will also contribute to this. AI-driven platforms will rise to the forefront of global military power.

Their cost-effectiveness and adaptability will make them the dominant force in ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance & Reconnaissance). They can operate at a scale and speed beyond human limits. They will also lead in electronic warfare and direct combat. Manned forces will retain specific and crucial roles. However, they will lose their strategic dominance. It will yield to the distributed, networked intelligence of autonomous systems.

This is not an incremental upgrade; it is a fundamental redefinition of military power. The nations that embrace this transformation will shape the future of global security. They invest in AI, autonomous systems, and the ethical frameworks to govern them. The battlefield is no longer defined by humans alone. It is now defined by intelligent machines operating across all domains.

Authors Note

Possibility ≠ Probability

This essay presents scenario-based strategic foresight, not prediction, to explore how intelligentised warfare will evolve.

What’s Possible: Technologies described have real precedent. Autonomous drone swarms, cyber-kinetic sabotage, AI decapitation strikes, and bio-disruption tactics are technically feasible. They have been operationally demonstrated (Israel’s 2025 strikes, vehicle hijacking, smart grid manipulation).

What’s Probable: Full-spectrum coordination across domains remains improbable near-term due to operational complexity, deterrent thresholds, escalation risks, and system resilience.

Reader Guidance: This is a stress test of strategic imagination, charting warfare’s outer edge if unconstrained by political restraint. Technical possibility does not equal strategic probability. The scenario underscores urgent needs for doctrine revision, ethical AI controls, supply chain vetting, and sovereign cyber infrastructure. We must engage seriously with war’s evolving nature before the possibility quietly becomes probability.