China’s disclosure of a new high-power microwave (HPM) weapon underscores how the intensifying drone vs. counter-drone contest in the Taiwan Strait is becoming a battle not just of platforms but of cost, resilience and control of the electromagnetic domain.
This month, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that China has unveiled new details of a truck-mounted HPM weapon capable of destroying drone swarms at distances beyond 3 km, underscoring its push to counter the growing battlefield threat posed by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
The system, known as the Hurricane 3000, was developed by state-owned defense contractor Norinco and was first publicly displayed during China’s large-scale September 2025 military parade in Beijing.
Norinco expert Yu Jianjun said the weapon’s effective interception range against small and light drones exceeds that of comparable systems deployed by the US military, shifting its role from short-range point defense to wider area denial.
Mounted on a heavy truck, the Hurricane 3000 uses radar to detect and track targets before electro-optical sensors provide precise acquisition, after which it emits HPM beams that disable drone electronics almost instantly.
Unlike missiles or guns, the system offers a low-cost-per-shot solution with minimal collateral damage and an effectively unlimited firing capacity, making it well-suited to defeating saturation attacks by drone swarms.
Yu said the weapon can operate independently or be integrated with lasers and artillery as part of a layered air-defense network, reflecting China’s broader effort to strengthen air, border and urban security amid rapid advances in drone warfare.
Looking at how HPMs could defeat drones, Zhao Zhang and co-authors report in a January 2024 article in the peer-reviewed journal Electronics that HPMs can disable or destroy drones by coupling intense electromagnetic energy into critical electronic subsystems through both front-door (antenna-based) and back-door (cable, aperture and circuit) pathways. Zhang and others explain that when HPM frequencies overlap with UAV operating bands, energy can enter receivers via antennas and physically damage sensitive components such as low-noise amplifiers.
They further show that even out-of-band HPMs can induce disruptive voltages and currents through cables and power lines, degrading datalinks, flight-control commands, and navigation sensors. The authors reviewed experiments indicating that HPM exposure can result in loss of control, abnormal flight behavior, motor and electronic speed control (ESC) damage, and ultimately uncontrolled crashes due to widespread electronic malfunction or permanent component damage.
Such effects could make HPMs effective against fiber-optic or autonomous drones, which were designed to eliminate the need for a datalink that could be jammed. The Economist points out in a June 2025 article that HPMs can create a lot of electronic noise and overheating, to the point that fiber-optic autonomous drones can’t “hear” themselves think, causing them to crash.
Beyond fiber-optic and autonomous systems, the report notes HPMs could also defeat shielded drones by inducing surface heating that overwhelms protective materials.
Delving deeper into the tactical uses of HPM weapons, Erich Rosenbach and other writers mention in a January 2025 Belfer Center report that from China’s tactical perspective, these microwaves are meant to defeat small drones close to People’s Liberation Army (PLA) units, reducing the effectiveness of US and Taiwanese attritable unmanned swarms and complicating reconnaissance and strike missions.
Rosenbach and other writers say that HPMs, alongside anti-aircraft guns and jamming, are point-defense tools that help protect invasion forces, key air-defense sites, and other frontline formations during a Taiwan campaign by neutralizing nearby UAVs without relying on scarce interceptors.
Furthermore, Stacie Pettyjohn and Molly Campbell note in a September 2025 report for the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) that HPMs function as a “final force field” against leakers that penetrate outer defensive layers, particularly around fixed sites such as air bases.
However, they point out that HPM weapons’ limited range, risk of collateral damage to friendly electronics, and reliance on layered defenses mean they cannot be used alone and must be tightly integrated into broader counter-drone architectures.
Situating these capabilities into a larger operational picture, Mina Marcus, in an April 2025 China Aeronautical Studies Institute (CASI) report, frames HPM weapons within the PLA’s systems-destruction and system-protection logic, emphasizing their contribution to maintaining “system stability” under swarm attack rather than simply defeating individual drones.
Marcus notes that at the operational level, Chinese analysts assess that drone swarms threaten operations by overloading defensive networks and collapsing key nodes and situate HPMs as one means to blunt these systemic effects by rapidly suppressing dense low-altitude threats once detected.
She also links HPM employment to lessons from Ukraine and Nagorno-Karabakh, stressing their role in reducing cost-exchange pressures and preserving higher-end interceptors for manned aircraft and missiles within prolonged, multi-layer counter-drone campaigns.
These advancements have significant implications for the US strategy against China in the Taiwan Strait. Specifically, China’s HPM capabilities may impact the US Replicator project, a US Department of Defense (DoD) initiative to field thousands of low‑cost, attritable autonomous systems across all domains to increase the costs of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.
A July 2024 US Congressional Research Service (CRS) report notes that while drones can be designed with countermeasures against directed-energy weapons such as HPMs, including shielding, ablative materials, highly reflective surfaces, rapid tumbling, or the use of smoke and obscurants, these hardening measures reduce the effectiveness of less powerful lasers and some microwave systems only at a cost: they add weight, complexity, and expense to the platform.
It explicitly cautions that incorporating shielding and related protections increases the cost and/or weight of target platforms, potentially undermining the economic logic of fielding low-cost, attritable drones in large numbers.
Still, China’s HPM weapon won’t make drone swarms obsolete overnight. Zachary Kallenborn and Marcel Plichta argue in a July 2024 Joint Force Quarterly article that US drone swarms can remain effective against Chinese HPM and other directed-energy defenses by exploiting those systems’ physical and operational limits.
They note that while HPMs have a wider cone of effect than lasers, they trade range for area coverage and are constrained by positioning, power, and cueing, while lasers require sustained dwell time on individual targets. Rather than relying on simple mass, the authors emphasize maneuver, dispersion, multi-axis approaches, and decoys to complicate detection and engagement and allow “leakers” to penetrate defenses.
They add that attritable drones, greater autonomy that reduces reliance on jam-vulnerable links and tactics that exploit atmospheric effects such as smoke, dust and thermal blooming can further degrade directed-energy effectiveness and preserve swarm utility under intense electromagnetic defense.
For the US and its allies, this underscores that the contest is shifting from whether swarms can be countered to who can better manage cost-exchange dynamics and system resilience – pitting Chinese electromagnetic defenses against US efforts to preserve the military and economic logic of distributed, attritable mass.
Another very small Ch weapon