Does Chinese military have swarms of drones controlled by one person?
Yes, the Chinese military is developing and has demonstrated drone swarm capabilities where a single operator can control multiple drones, although the extent of this control can vary. While "true" autonomous swarming, like what is seen in light shows, is different from military applications, the military is focused on coordinated, multi-drone missions supervised by a single person using a laptop or other controller.
China is a leader in developing these technologies for military purposes.
Military drone swarms
Coordination: Swarms of drones can be deployed to perform missions cooperatively with limited human oversight.
Single operator control: Some systems are designed for a single operator to launch and control a large number of drones from a ground-based system or a "mothership" aircraft.
Functionality: Drones within a swarm can work together, sharing information and adjusting their behavior to complete tasks like reconnaissance and precision strikes.
Autonomous adaptation: Some drones can autonomously adapt their behavior during a mission, such as switching to self-guidance and regrouping if communications are jammed.
Limitations and future development
"True" swarming: Some experts distinguish between the choreographed light shows and military drone swarms, noting that a true military swarm is a single, unified entity with a higher degree of autonomy.
Human supervision: While one person can control many drones, a human controller is still needed to set overall goals or stop actions if necessary.
“The Navy was attempting to launch and recover more than 30 drone boats from a combat ship off the coast of California in May when more than a dozen of the uncrewed vessels failed to carry out their missions. The boats had rejected their inputs and automatically idled as a fail-safe, making them "dead" in the water.
The botched experiment quickly became a potential hazard to other vessels in the exercise. Military personnel scrambled overnight to clean up the mess, towing the boats to shore until 9 a.m. the next day.
The drone boats were relying on autonomy software called Lattice, made by California-based Anduril Industries. The Navy said the exercise was handled safely, but the incident alarmed Navy personnel, who said in a follow-up report that company representatives had misguided the military. In comments that were unusual for such a report, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, four sailors warned of "continuous operational security violations, safety violations, and contracting performer misguidances (Anduril Industries)." If the software configuration wasn't immediately corrected and vetted, they wrote, there would be "extreme risk to force and potential for loss of life."
Since its founding in 2017, Anduril Industries has become one of the hottest companies in a crowded field of defense-tech startups, promising to deliver hardware and software that ushers in a new era of autonomous warfare and equip the U.S. military with the speed that only a startup can offer. The privately held company was valued at more than $30 billion in its last funding round and has scored an impressive number of military contracts to build prototypes of everything from unmanned jet fighters to mixed-reality headsets to battlefield-management systems.
The company's founder, billionaire Palmer Luckey, has made his convictions clear. "We spend our own money building defense products that work, rather than asking taxpayers to foot the bill. The result is that we move much faster and at lower cost than most traditional [large defense companies]," Luckey said in an April TED Talk. "Unlike traditional contractors, we build, test and deploy our products in months, not years."
The startup's fast-moving approach comes with its share of setbacks -- during closed military exercises, at private drone ranges and even on the battlefield in Ukraine.
In California, a mechanical issue damaged the engine in Anduril's unmanned jet fighter Fury in a ground test over the summer ahead of a critical first flight for the Air Force. In August, a test involving its Anvil counterdrone system caused a 22-acre fire in Oregon. And in the exercises with unmanned boats off the coast of California, Anduril's Lattice software struggled to command and control vessels.
Anduril's only real battlefield experience -- in Ukraine -- has been marred as well, including vulnerability to enemy jamming, according to former employees and others familiar with the systems in Ukraine. Some front-line soldiers of Ukraine's SBU security service, for instance, found that their Altius loitering drones crashed and failed to hit their targets. The drones were so problematic that they stopped using them in 2024, people familiar with the matter said.
"The challenge will be, can they deliver? They have minimum viable products in a bunch of different areas," said Bryan Clark, a former Navy strategist who is now at the Hudson Institute.
After the Journal inquired about the incidents, the company said its methods can lead to testing failures. "We recognize that our highly iterative model of technology development -- moving fast, testing constantly, failing often, refining our work, and doing it all over again -- can make the job of our critics easier," the company said in a statement. "That is a risk we accept. We do fail . . . a lot."
Representatives from Anduril and those who defend the company say these issues occur in any weapons-development program and that the company's engineers are making impressive strides. They say that none of the incidents suggest fundamental problems with its products.
The company said it has maintained a "near continuous" presence in Ukraine to update software and weapons, and that its drones have proved effective against a large number of Russian assets.
The Lattice software aims to connect various weapons systems to enable a single servicemember to control a range of drones. On its website, the company says Lattice can orchestrate "machine-to-machine tasks at scales and speeds beyond human capacity."
The platform "lets us deploy millions of weapons without risking millions of lives. It also allows us to make updates to those weapons at the speed of code," Luckey said in April.
But in some Navy exercises, Lattice has fallen far short of expectations, according to documents, defense officials and people familiar with the matter. In some cases, operators have had to manually send commands to boats or control them remotely with a device due to the software's shortfalls, the people said.
In the May exercise with drone boats in California, unmanned boats made by BlackSea Technologies were relying on Lattice when they began to idle in the water. The boats were rejecting commands and were unable to reliably maneuver away from other traffic, prompting a safety stand-down, according to people familiar with the exercise.
Anduril said the failure wasn't Lattice's fault, but rather a bug in the software on the boats, made by BlackSea Technologies. Anduril said it identified the root cause, fixed the problem and returned to the exercise a few days later to successfully complete autonomous mission plans.
BlackSea referred questions about the exercise to the Navy. BlackSea also said that its boat is designed to work with a range of software and that it has successfully operated with a half-dozen other software stacks.
A Navy spokesperson didn't comment on the companies but said the exercise had multiple mitigation measures in place and didn't create risk to force or potential for loss of life.
Three people familiar with the exercise said the problem was Anduril's because it was the company's responsibility to implement its software correctly. The authors of the preliminary report, who said Anduril had misguided the military, couldn't be reached to comment.
Anduril's most high-profile, and potentially most lucrative, military project has also faced challenges.
When Anduril won a multimillion-dollar Air Force contract last year to develop and test a prototype of an unmanned jet fighter, known as a "Collaborative Combat Aircraft," it signaled the company's biggest shot yet at building a major weapon system for the Pentagon. The company, which has never manufactured weapons at a large scale, is building a plant in Ohio to produce the unmanned jet.
Air Force leaders initially set expectations for the aircraft to fly before the end of summer. But in a test in August, a mechanical issue caused a nail to be sucked into the aircraft's intake, damaging the engine, people familiar with the matter said.
Anduril didn't publicly disclose the engine issue, and when asked about the timing of the flight during a call with reporters in September, Luckey said the delay was due to the rigors of Air Force ground testing because the Air Force had only one Anduril plane to work with at the time.
"If it was up to my engineers, we'd push the throttle and shoot into the air months ago," Luckey said during the call.
Executives also told reporters that the company was taking time to get the software right, which they said would allow them to "leapfrog" the test plan by flying semiautonomously.
By the time the drone jet Fury took to the skies over Southern California on Oct. 31, the test flight came two months after the first flight of Anduril's main competitor in the Air Force program, General Atomics.
Anduril said the nail that caused the engine damage was the result of a temporarily installed test instrument and had nothing to do with the structural design of the aircraft. The Air Force said Anduril and General Atomics were ahead of the program's schedule, which required a test flight of their aircraft by the end of the year.
"Both Anduril and General Atomics are in the very early developmental stages of what promises great opportunity, but there's a long way to go to realize that opportunity," said David Deptula, a retired Air Force lieutenant general who is now dean of the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies, an aerospace think tank.
During an August drone intercept test in Oregon, Anduril's Anvil counterdrone system crashed and caused a 22-acre fire near the Pendleton Airport, according to an incident report obtained by the Journal through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The report said Anduril had tried to put out the flames with its own vehicle, but three trucks from the local fire department had to be brought in to extinguish the fire. Anduril said it has since developed a mitigation plan for impact and intercept testing at the range to mitigate or avoid any fires in the future.
Major defense companies that have been testing for decades typically understand their boundaries and have adequate mitigation measures on site, analysts say. "Anduril is less prepared institutionally to do this, so they are finding their way around," said Jonathan Wong, a senior policy researcher at Rand, referring to the fire.
"We test five days a week nearly 52 weeks out of the year at several of our test sites across the US," the company said. "We expect things like this to occur once in a while due to the volume of tests."” [1]
1. Defense-Tech Startup Hits Weapon Setbacks. Holliday, Shelby; Somerville, Heather; MacDonald, Alistair; Glazer, Emily. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 29 Nov 2025: A1.
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