China’s public push toward swarm-enabled aerial warfare has crossed an inflection point in 2025. State media and defense outlets have been circulating images and official confirmations for a new category of platform that matters because it changes how large numbers of small weapons can be projected and coordinated from standoff altitudes. The most prominent example is the Jiu Tian or Jiutian “drone mothership” concept. Chinese reporting and international coverage indicate the platform is a high-altitude long-endurance unmanned aircraft with a very large payload bay intended to disgorge scores of loitering munitions and small drones in a single sortie. That capability, even at early test stages, forces planners to treat swarms not as science fiction but as an operational variable.

Put bluntly, the Jiutian optics matter because they compress time and distance for swarm effects. A mothership that can operate at tens of thousands of feet and carry dozens to more than a hundred expendable UAS multiplies the reach of inexpensive, attritable weapons. Instead of launching loitering munitions from nearby coastlines or ships, a flotilla of airborne launch nodes can push swarms past the first ring of point defenses and present multiple, simultaneous axes of attack. In planning terms this drives three consequences: defenders must cover more spatial volume, they must budget for simultaneous multi-vector engagements, and they cannot assume a single interception layer will be decisive.

But capability is not destiny. The Chinese program stack that produces massed loitering munitions is mature in scale if not yet proven at operational complexity. China’s industry and military-civil fusion policies have already produced vehicle-mounted mass launchers and a variety of small loitering munitions optimized for cost and mass employment. These tactical systems are the hard edge of the problem: dozens of cheap, tube-launched kamikaze drones integrated into mobile launchers and logistics chains create the volume needed to threaten runways, parked aircraft, fuel and command nodes. The PLA’s demonstrated interest in mass launchers and tube-launched loitering munitions shows the gradient from tactical mass to operational swarm capability.

So what makes Summer 2025 distinct from previous years? Two things. First, the public schedule and state media acknowledgement of flight testing for platforms meant to act as airborne swarm controllers raises the probability that testing will expose real-world strengths and weaknesses of integrated swarm operations. Second, defenders worldwide are accelerating asymmetric responses that complicate the calculus of using massed swarms in a high intensity fight. Recent Chinese open-press coverage of hard-kill area defenses, such as a so-called “Bullet Curtain” close-in barrage weapon, demonstrates Beijing is not just focused on offense but on tools to blunt adversary drone swarms. That design philosophy is notable: it recognizes swarms’ defining feature, scale, and tries to translate scale into a defensive advantage.

Operational impact matrix: what swarms can and cannot do in Summer 2025

  • What they can do now: saturate and complicate layered, legacy point defenses; impose logistics and tempo costs by forcing defenders to expend interceptors or shift to manual engagement rules; strike soft and semi-hardened targets such as fuel dumps, radars, parked fixed-wing aircraft, and exposed command nodes; and provide distributed ISR and electronic warfare effects when configured for jamming or sensing. Platforms like airborne motherships make these effects more distributable over geography.

  • What they struggle with today: consistent precision against moving, well-hardened targets at range; survivability in the face of high-end integrated air defenses that combine long-range missiles, fighter patrols, and layered electronic warfare; and robust autonomy in complex, contested electromagnetic environments where GPS, datalinks or communications can be denied or spoofed. Mass is powerful but not omnipotent. The physics of detection, kill chains and attrition still favor defenders who can field overlapping, complementary counters.

Defenses and deterrence: how allies and partners are responding

Western and allied efforts are pragmatic and bifurcated. First, there is investment in proliferating low-cost attritable systems to create defensive swarms and area denial capabilities of their own. The Pentagon’s Replicator concept aims to mass-produce attritable autonomous systems to offset adversary numerical advantages and to complicate Chinese calculus by denying easy mass effects. Second, defenders are accelerating directed energy and electromagnetic options that can engage many small targets at low marginal cost per engagement. High-power microwave demonstrators and other electronic warfare tools have already shown the ability to disable groups of small drones in test scenarios, and these systems are being iterated and ruggedized for field use. In short, the response path is both to buy more of our own expendables and to build scalable area defenses that change the economics of a massed drone attack.

But there is a technical and operational gap to bridge. Academic and engineering communities flag persistent shortfalls in detection and classification of small, low-signature UAS in cluttered littoral or urban environments, and in the ability to coordinate heterogeneous sensors and shooters at scale in real time. Those gaps are where cheap swarms can cause outsized disruption. Rapidly fielded directed energy or HPM systems blunt these advantages, but they require power, cooling and integration that limit their forward posture compared with a truck-mounted invader. The race is therefore about creating resilient, layered systems that combine kinetic, directed-energy and electronic measures with automated command and control for very high engagement rates.

What to watch in Summer 2025

  • Test outcomes for the Jiutian program and whether flight tests validate swarming deployment and mothership launch logistics. Public confirmation of successful mass launches from a high-altitude node will materially increase the urgency of allied counter-swarm deployments.

  • Operational demonstrations of area defense prototypes such as the Norinco “Bullet Curtain” and allied HPM/laser field trials. If hard-kill area defenses prove reliable in repeated live-fire trials against heterogeneous swarms, the asymmetric advantage of volume will be degraded.

  • Doctrine and basing changes among regional actors. The most plausible PLA use cases for large-scale swarm employment in the near term are gray-zone coercion, anti-access operations around contested islands, and expeditionary strikes against lightly defended infrastructure. Allied adjustments in dispersal, hardening and mobile airfield operations will blunt many of the lower-cost swarm effects.

Policy implications and near-term choices

1) Don’t fetishize a single technological silver bullet. The right posture is a layered, redundant defense that combines cheaper attritable systems, electronic warfare, and directed-energy where possible. Investments should prioritize scalable C-UAS networks that integrate radar, RF detection, optical sensors and automated shooters.

2) Focus on production and doctrine together. Replicating the PLA’s advantage in numbers requires procurement that is matched by training, logistics and command software that works under stress. Buying thousands of drones without operational concepts is not enough.

3) Push the sensor problem. Small UAS detection in cluttered littorals and urban canyons remains the limiting factor for effective defense. Funding for sensor fusion, low-SNR detection and resilient identification systems will pay disproportionate dividends.

4) Exercise escalation control. Swarm deployment lowers the cost of kinetic effects. This makes prudent political-calculations harder. Diplomacy and signaling must account for the plausibility of rapid, deniable swarm strikes that can be mounted from hundreds of kilometers away. Transparency around norms for UAS use in crises would reduce miscalculation risk.

Bottom line

Summer 2025 is the moment the world has to stop treating drone swarms as a laboratory curiosity and start treating them as an operational challenge with three attributes: mass, distribution and speed. China’s publicized motherships and the already-proliferated tactical launchers make that challenge real. That said, mass does not guarantee victory. The decisive variables are integration and attrition economics. If defenders can field affordable, layered interception and detection at scale, the utility of massed swarms will be blunted. If defenders fail to coordinate sensors, shooters and production on an industrial footing, swarms will remain an asymmetric lever that can impose high costs on hardened systems and political cohesion. Summer 2025 is a test of which side can translate industrial scale into operational effect and which side can turn scale into defeat through clever, layered defense.