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- [Narrator] Drones that act like a swarm of bees,
and others that could hide from enemy radar.
These are some
of the latest remotely operated military aircraft
in China's arsenal.
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- We've seen sort of an explosion of creativity
from the Chinese defense industry.
(speaking in foreign language)
- [Narrator] And Beijing has said modernization
includes building more sophisticated drones
at a time of tension between the US and China.
- They want a military
that can employ artificial intelligence,
autonomous systems and generally,
a lot more unmanned systems.
- [Narrator] China's military spending
is lower than the US
but Beijing has been dedicating a growing portion
of its budget to drones and other military equipment.
And while Chinese drones don't have
as much battlefield experiences as the American-made ones,
we compared different models
to see how Beijing is pushing new designs
and capabilities to better equip its military
for possible conflicts in the region.
Since the 1930s, the US military has been one
of the early pioneers of unmanned aerial vehicles.
Today, it flies a fleet of thousands of drones
that have operated in countries,
including Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
- Drones are gonna become very important in modern combat.
- [Narrator] Timothy Heath
has been studying China's military strategy
for more than 20 years.
And is a senior researcher at Rand Corporation,
a non-profit organization
that contributes strategic analysis
to the US Department of Defense.
Drones offer options unavailable to manned aircraft
since they can be remotely operated
or autonomously follow pre-programmed paths.
- [Timothy] There is a lower risk of human causalities.
You get the ability to loiter, for example,
and to use advanced sensors,
so you can have more precise targeting.
In general, drones are lower cost than manned aircraft.
- [Narrator] It's these capabilities
that have made China interested
in expanding and modernizing its own fleet.
- They are building on what the US military have done.
The first generation of Chinese unmanned aircraft
were pretty derivative of the US.
- [Narrator] One of China's earliest models
looks almost identical to the US Predator drone
and works similarly.
Both are remotely controlled via satellite
and can carry missiles.
But China is also tweaking the design
so its drones are better suited
for wherever its military is likely to deploy them.
Like the Global Hawk, the Chinese military says the WZ-7
is capable of operating at a high altitude
to conduct surveillance missions.
But the US drone is larger
and can fly for longer periods of time,
allowing it to operate around the globe
to support air and ground forces.
- WZ-7 probably it is gonna be used mainly
in the region or the maritime space
in the East China Sea and South China Sea.
In that area, the Chinese don't need as long an endurance.
- [Narrator] What it does need is the ability
to navigate unstable weather conditions
in the region, like typhoons.
So the WZ-7 is designed with two sets of overlapping wings
that the Chinese military says create
more airborne stability.
Beside tweaking designs,
China is also rethinking how many drones it can deploy
at the same time.
The Golden Eagle 150B can drop small bombs,
and China has said it wants
to use several of them simultaneously.
- It's kind like a swarm of bees
where each individual bee knows what it must do
and can make its own decisions.
If one bee next to it gets killed,
the others will continue swarming to sting.
- [Narrator] China hasn't demonstrated these drones
but showed how the swarming tactic would work
with another aircraft.
The military hasn't said how it will manage
a large network like this remotely.
Drone experts say the key would be to program them
with sophisticated sensors to communicate with each other.
So they approach the target together
while avoid crashing into one another.
If the swarming drones can work in the real world,
this cheaper unit could help exhaust
an enemy's missile defense system.
Another creative approach China is taking combines some
of the best features from multiple aircraft
to build something that's not in the US arsenal.
China's GJ-11 is a reconnaissance combat drone
that has some of the features
of an American B-2 Bomber.
For instance, a flying wing design
that allows the air frame to deflect radar signals.
China hasn't publicly demonstrated this drone
but he says it would probably rely more on automation
unlike the B-2 Bomber,
which needs two pilots onboard.
- Because it's flying far from Chinese command centers,
it flies at a very high altitude,
they would have to program in some mission parameters
and the GJ-11 rely on navigation capabilities
and target identification capabilities
to carry out its strikes behind enemy lines.
- There's definitely some distance
between development and deployment.
- [Narrator] Elsa Kania is an adjunct senior fellow
at the non-profit and bipartisan think tank Center
for a New American Security,
which receives some funding from the US State Department.
She's been studying China's military tech innovation
for about seven years.
The Chinese military hasn't used its drone
in real warfare but over the past decade,
the country has exported over 200 drones to 16 countries.
- They've been crashed,
there have been complaints about the reliability
but as Chinese drones are used by other militaries,
the data or the insights generated
from those use cases may improve their design
or development going forward.
- [Narrator] The Chinese Defense Ministry
didn't respond to a request for comment.
Last year, the official newspaper
for the Chinese military said
that drones are a new experiment
and a growing trend for future combat.
Kania says the newer models point
to how China could eventually integrate AI
and machine learning to improve performance
and make them highly autonomous.
But that also raises questions about the security
of any AI-driven drone.
- There are ways that drones
can be hacked, jammed, disrupted.
With increased autonomy
does come a greater risk of failures
that are unexpected or of systems that are immature,
proving to be unreliable.
- [Narrator] Despite all these concerns,
China is quickly advancing not just the development
of drones but other parts of its arsenal.
(bomb booming)
And that could increase concerns from the US
and its allies in the region.
- With these drones, what you'll see
is that China will be able
to respond even faster and more effectively,
and it's possible that the long-term effect
of increased Chinese use of UAVs
to dominate its neighbors is increased tensions
between China and many of its neighbors.
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