Strategic Report: The Impact of Low-Cost Weapons on Global Military Balance – Lessons from the War in Ukraine and Implications for US Defense, with an Analysis from the Chinese PLA

Introduction

Modern warfare is undergoing a rapid evolution, a profound transformation that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) of China is closely monitoring, particularly in light of lessons learned from the conflict in Ukraine. The principle of achieving "small victories for big victories" has emerged as a driving force, demonstrated in numerous exemplary battles. Low-cost precision weapons – such as multi-rotor drones, long-range cruise missiles, and suicide drones – are redefining the rules of combat, challenging traditional military systems centered on large platforms and overturning the centuries-old balance between offense and defense. This report will analyze, based on PLA insights, the characteristics of these weapons, the vulnerabilities of traditional defense systems, the impact of combined "high-low" attacks, and the fundamental principles for building future naval defense systems.

by Gabriele e Nicola Iuvinale

1. Revolutionary Characteristics of Low-Cost Precision Weapons

Low-cost precision weapons exhibit a set of attributes that make them a disruptive force, as observed by the PLA:

• Unprecedented Cost-Effectiveness: The most significant advantage is the enormous cost disparity. While traditional anti-ship missiles can cost millions of dollars, these new weapons fall within a price range of $500 to $50,000, which is 2-3 orders of magnitude lower. This economic asymmetry provides the attacker with unprecedented strategic leverage, enabling them to wage a prolonged war of attrition that the defender can hardly sustain financially. The PLA has certainly noted how a modified FPV drone costing only $1,200 was able to destroy Russian strategic bombers worth hundreds of millions of dollars in Ukraine's "Operation Spider Web," a clear example of modern warfare's "cost-effectiveness priority" logic.

• Adoption of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) Technology: The integration of commercial components and technologies completely subverts the traditional military research and development model. This not only drastically reduces production costs but also accelerates the innovation cycle, shifting from years to months or even weeks. This rapid development allows for continuous adaptation to changing battlefield needs, a fundamental lesson for the PLA.

• Modular Design for Flexibility and Mass Production: The modular design of these weapons enhances their operational efficiency and allows for rapid mass production during wartime. Examples like Ukraine, Russia, and Iran, which have increased their monthly drone production capacity from dozens to thousands, demonstrate the effectiveness of this highly modular design and production concept in responding agilely to operational demands. The PLA is likely interested in replicating or surpassing such production capabilities.

• Disruptive Tactical Capabilities:

  • Stealth and Penetration: The absence of large combat platforms allows for covert launching from various civilian platforms. The use of radar-absorbing materials, thermal signature characteristics similar to small fishing boats, and the ability to blend into civilian traffic (like the Ukrainian Magura unmanned boats) make their detection extremely difficult until the last moment. The "military-civilian hybrid" infiltration model, which involves hiding suicide drones and cruise missiles inside civilian containers on ordinary cargo ships, renders traditional naval blockades ineffective. This concept of "covert infiltration" is of great interest to the PLA in scenarios such as the South China Sea.

  • Long-Range Control and Autonomous Combat: Advanced remote-control technologies, based on encrypted satellite communication links and real-time image feedback systems, allow operators to control drone swarms hundreds of kilometers away. The dual control mode (precise manual control and autonomous navigation based on pre-programmed routes in case of communication disruption) ensures operational effectiveness even in hostile environments. The PLA is undoubtedly exploring similar solutions for long-range control and autonomous combat capabilities.

  • Precision Attack and Functional Damage: Despite their low cost, these weapons can execute precision attacks on key parts of ships, thanks to advanced guidance technology and special warhead designs. Multi-rotor drones can hover to identify targets and specialize in "high-value vulnerable points" like active phased array radars and communication antennas on ships. FPV suicide drones dive at a nearly vertical angle to attack the ship's superstructure. Unmanned boats similar to the Ukrainian Magura-7 carry anti-ship weapons modified from anti-tank missiles to attack key parts of ship superstructures. While these attacks are difficult to hit heavy targets, they can cause ships to lose their combat capability by precisely damaging key systems, a tactic the PLA may wish to employ.

    
    

2. Structural Weaknesses of Traditional Maritime Defense Systems

Facing this new threat, traditional naval air and missile defense systems exhibit profound vulnerabilities, as highlighted by PLA studies on the war in Ukraine:

• Detection Capability Limitations: Modern shipborne radar systems are primarily optimized for traditional aircraft and have inherent shortcomings in detecting small targets flying at very low altitudes due to the Earth's curvature (detection range for small drones flying at only 10 meters typically does not exceed 25 kilometers). More severely, modern low-cost weapons extensively use composite materials and non-metallic structures, and commercial radar-absorbing materials are employed, resulting in an extremely small radar cross-section. The complex electromagnetic environment further exacerbates the detection problem. The reaction time available to defense systems is extremely limited. Defenders often cannot sound the alarm until the weapon has entered the terminal attack phase, at which point even the most advanced air defense systems struggle to intercept effectively. The PLA assesses these aspects to develop effective countermeasures.

• Insufficient Interception Effectiveness: The power characteristics and guidance logic of traditional shipborne air defense missiles are not effective against small drones maneuvering at low speeds and having extremely weak thermal signatures, making effective lock-on by infrared-guided missiles difficult.

• Fire Channel Saturation: Modern naval air defense systems are usually equipped with a limited number of vertical missile launch units and close-in weapon systems, and their simultaneous interception capabilities (i.e., "fire channels") are strictly limited. Take the US "Burke" class destroyer as an example. Although its AN/SPY-1 radar can track hundreds of targets simultaneously, it can actually only provide guidance to 6-12 air defense missiles at a time, creating an obvious "guidance bottleneck." Faced with a swarm attack of dozens or even hundreds of drones, these systems will rapidly lose their defensive capability due to fire channel saturation, a critical vulnerability point for the PLA.

• System Coordination Difficulty: In theory, modern maritime defense should constitute a multi-layered interception system with long, medium, and short range, high, medium, and low altitude, but coordination among various systems encounters numerous challenges. In the maritime domain, even air defense coordination among different platforms in a naval formation faces issues such as communication delays and difficulties in identifying allies and enemies, making it difficult to effectively respond to saturation attacks from multiple directions.

• Economic Unsustainability: The cost imbalance between offense and defense has reached an alarming level. A $500 FPV drone can force the enemy to launch an air defense missile worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (like the $2.4 million interceptor missile used by the US military against Houthi drones). This enormous economic disparity places the defender at a disadvantage in a long-term war of attrition, facing the risk of resource exhaustion at the strategic level even if successful at the tactical level. Ironically, even if the defender were technically capable of intercepting most threats, they would ultimately fail strategically due to resource depletion. This structural imbalance is reflected not only in a single battle but also in overall military construction. For example, the construction cost of a US "Burke" class destroyer is approximately $2 billion, a budget sufficient to produce tens of thousands of unmanned surface vessels or hundreds of thousands of suicide drones. The PLA has recognized that this "cost-effectiveness priority" is the fundamental logic of modern warfare, and this fundamental asymmetry in resource allocation has presented traditional naval forces with a dilemma in confronting large-scale, low-cost precision weapons: accept the reality that the cost of defense far exceeds the cost of attack, or abandon effective defense of certain areas. This dilemma is radically changing the balance of power at sea, giving the attacker unprecedented asymmetric advantage.

  
  

3. High-Low Combined Attack: The Ultimate Challenge

The strategic combination of low-cost precision weapons and high-end attack systems is giving rise to a new mode of maritime warfare. This "high-low combination" not only amplifies the advantages of each weapon system but also creates a coordinated attack paradigm that the defender can hardly handle effectively, a key lesson for the PLA:

• Functional Complementarity and Efficiency Multiplier: In this mode, low-cost precision weapons perform multiple key tasks:

  • As "expendable resources," they overwhelm the enemy's limited defensive resources with their numerical superiority.

  • As "reconnaissance outposts," they gather real-time battlefield information and provide target data for high-end weapons.

  • As "electronic jammers," they are equipped with simple but effective electronic countermeasures to reduce the enemy's detection capability.

  • As "decoy systems," they force the enemy to reveal defensive positions and reaction patterns. This functional division of labor allows the overall attack system to maintain the economic advantages of low-cost weapons while compensating for the shortcomings due to insufficient individual system capabilities.

• Temporal Coordination and Wave-Based Attacks: The tactical core of high-low combined attacks usually manifests in a "first consumption, then decisive battle" rhythm. The first wave of low-cost weapons is deployed on a large scale, forcing the defender to prematurely expose their firepower configuration and consume limited air defense ammunition. The second wave of high-end weapons then delivers precise attacks against the identified weak points in the defense. This wave coordination not only maximizes the effectiveness of each weapon but also creates a dual problem that the defender cannot simultaneously address, as the PLA has certainly noted: exposing the air defense system too early means facing precision attacks from high-end weapons, while preserving strength to await high-end threats might lead to the defense line being penetrated by saturation attacks from the initial groups of low-cost weapons.

• Technological Integration and Intelligent Coordination: Modern combat networks have been able to achieve real-time data sharing and activity coordination between low-cost platforms and high-end systems, creating an integrated "perception-decision-attack" closed loop. Unmanned boat swarms and naval formations can form a networked distributed kill system, with the former responsible for frontline situational awareness and target identification, and the latter providing network nodes and precise fire support. This intelligent coordination goes beyond simple "fire coordination" and allows for a geometric increase in overall combat effectiveness.

• Unbearable Economic Dilemma: From an economic perspective, the combination of high-low cost attacks creates a nearly impossible cost dilemma for the defender. The defender must simultaneously face a large number of low-cost threats and higher-end threats. Regardless of which side attention is focused on, they will face fatal risks from the other side. This "dilemma" has radically shaken the economic sustainability of the traditional maritime defense system and has thrown the defender into a "cost trap": intercepting low-cost weapons is expensive, while ignoring low-cost weapons will lead to systemic paralysis. Any choice will be difficult to sustain in the long term. The PLA is clearly planning how to exploit this dilemma.

  
  

4. Revolutionary Evolution of Maritime Operations: A Paradigm Shift from Platforms to Systems

The rise of low-cost precision weapons has not only changed the way battles are fought at the tactical level but has also profoundly reshaped the fundamental principles of maritime power and the mechanisms of victory. This revolution, centered on "large-scale, sustainable distributed precision attacks," is giving rise to a new paradigm of naval warfare, and its impact extends far beyond simple technological upgrades, representing a radical reconstruction of the entire maritime security system, which the PLA is analyzing for its future doctrine:

• "Intelligence + Scale" as the New Standard: Unlike traditional models of "quantitative suppression" or "qualitative victories," this model seeks a dialectical unity between the two, maintaining the advantage of quantity to achieve saturation attack, while incorporating sufficient intelligence to ensure precision attacks. The design concept of "sufficient intelligence" rather than "extreme intelligence" allows the system to achieve the key capabilities needed for real combat while maintaining economic feasibility, an approach the PLA may adopt.

• "Penetrating Sea Control" Replacing Traditional "Area Control": Unlike the traditional concept of sea control, which pursues 360-degree control of a specific maritime area, penetrating sea control accepts the reality that absolute security is no longer possible and instead seeks to create local advantages within a specific time window to complete specific tasks. This new mode of sea control is mainly realized through three paths:

  • Stealth Penetration: Utilizing stealth platforms to bypass enemy defense networks.

  • Breakthrough Penetration: Breaking through interception by high-speed, maneuverable, and other penetration methods.

  • Asymmetric Penetration: Leveraging unconventional platforms and civilian camouflage to evade defense identification. The PLA may see "penetrating sea control" as a way to challenge traditional naval powers.

• Transformation of the Defense Industry System: The long cycle (5-10 years of R&D) and high-cost model of traditional military enterprises have been unable to adapt to the rapid iteration needs of unmanned system technology (6-12 months to update the next generation). The Ukrainian "military-civilian integration" model provides important inspiration: its drone R&D primarily relies on small innovation teams and civilian forces to achieve key combat capabilities at very low costs. The US Department of Defense has elevated the status of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) to accelerate the transformation of commercial technology into military applications. This change is not just about production efficiency but also reflects a fundamental shift in military innovation paradigm: from closed ownership to open collaboration, from perfectionism to rapid iteration, and from "creating the best system" to "keeping the system evolving," an approach the PLA is likely implementing.

  
  

5. The Necessity and Possibility of Low-Cost Defense Technology

Facing the survival crisis caused by low-cost precision weapons, navies around the world are actively exploring diversified technological pathways to build economically affordable large-scale defense capabilities. These technological solutions are not simple fixes to traditional defense systems but systematic innovations ranging from operational concepts to technical foundations, aiming to reconstruct the balance between maritime offense and defense, as certainly evaluated by the PLA:

• Precision and Dexterity Upgrade of Naval Guns: Traditional air defense missiles exhibit obvious performance redundancies and high-cost problems when dealing with low-cost threats, while modern large and medium caliber naval gun systems are becoming economical and efficient interception means, introducing advanced guidance technologies and intelligent ammunition. Compared to traditional missile interception, the cost per shot of advanced naval gun systems can be kept within a range of $1,000 to $5,000, achieving an acceptable economic balance with most low-cost threats. The employment of guided rockets by carrier-based aircraft has also become a new option.

• Directed Energy Weapons (DEW): Represent a disruptive technological breakthrough in maritime defense, whose main advantages are extremely low per-launch costs and virtually unlimited "magazine depth." High-energy lasers (HEL) and high-power microwaves (HPM) constitute the two main technical solutions for directed energy weapons, each suitable for different combat scenarios. These directed energy weapons are particularly suitable for large-scale attacks against low-cost threats, and their economic convenience and prolonged combat capability are exactly what traditional defense methods lack. The PLA is investing in these technologies.

  
  

6. Principles for Building Future Maritime Defense Systems

The response to this challenge is not only technical but conceptual and strategic, and the PLA is formulating its own principles based on these considerations:

• Efficacy Matching: The fundamental principle for building an economical and efficient defense system. The traditional "missile-only interception" model has proven to be economically and effectively unsustainable. Instead, it is replaced by the concept of precision defense, which accurately matches interception means based on threat value and technical characteristics. This ensures that the investment of defense resources yields the maximum marginal benefit and avoids wasting high-end weapons on low-value targets.

• Distributed Operations Concept: Represents a paradigm shift in maritime defense organization. The traditional centralized defense model, centered on aircraft carriers or large destroyers, shows obvious vulnerability in the face of saturation attacks, while a distributed network composed of a large number of small and medium-sized platforms is more resilient and robust. With this architecture, unmanned platforms are no longer simple sensors or weapon carriers but become intelligent nodes in the defense network, capable of autonomously performing patrol, identification, and limited interception tasks, and forming an adaptable and difficult-to-overwhelm defensive system by dynamically combining diversified and low-cost functional modules. Distributed defense not only reduces the risk of single-point failure but also forces the attacker to disperse firepower and not concentrate on attacking high-value targets. The PLA considers distributed defense essential for survival in a modern threat environment.

• Intelligent Decision-Making and Autonomous Response: The decision speed of modern swarm attacks far exceeds the reaction limit of the human command chain, which requires a defense system with a higher degree of automation. The future maritime defense system should adopt a "human-on-the-loop" rather than "human-in-the-loop" control mode, meaning the artificial intelligence system is responsible for real-time threat assessment and weapon allocation, while human commanders focus on rule processing and key decisions. The PLA is at the forefront of developing AI systems for command and control.

• Open Architecture and Continuous Upgrades: The decade-long procurement and maintenance cycle of traditional military equipment cannot adapt to the rapid evolution of low-cost threats, which requires defense platforms to adopt modular and software-defined design concepts. Thanks to standardized hardware interfaces and modular functional components, defense platforms can integrate new interception methods in a "plug and play" mode without having to replace the entire system.

• Economic Affordability and Strategic Sustainability: In a long-term confrontation, the economic sustainability of the defense system can be more decisive than technical effectiveness. Reducing defense costs through off-the-shelf commercial technologies, economies of scale, and optimizing production processes will make long-term defense against large-scale attacks possible. Defense system cost management should be applied to the entire life cycle, including using additive manufacturing to reduce production costs, designing easy-to-maintain architectures to reduce support requirements, and planning mid-term upgrades to extend their service life. The PLA recognizes that strategic sustainability will depend on the ability to economically sustain defense.

  
  

Conclusion

The People's Liberation Army of China's insights from the war in Ukraine clearly indicate that the rise of low-cost precision weapons has profoundly altered the balance between offense and defense. This new logic of warfare, driven by cost-effectiveness, poses unprecedented challenges to traditional military systems, particularly in the maritime domain. Vulnerabilities in detection, fire channel saturation, and economic unsustainability are amplified by combined high-low attacks.

To counter this trend and ensure its maritime security, the PLA, like other armed forces, must embrace a paradigm shift: from reliance on a few large platforms to the adoption of distributed, modular, intelligent, and, crucially, economically sustainable systems. Investment in directed energy weapons, upgrades to naval guns, and the development of open, adaptable defense architectures are necessary steps. The "cost war" has become a central dimension of modern conflict, and only a systemic innovation prioritizing economic efficiency and distributed resilience can re-establish a new balance in the maritime domain, enabling the PLA to address future threats and, by extension, influencing considerations for US defense.