As the US races to deploy containerized drone swarms as a key future warfare element, the effort reveals questions about whether drones are a real revolution or a workaround for institutional limits.
This month, The War Zone (TWZ) reported that the US military has launched a formal effort to solicit industry proposals for containerized systems capable of storing, launching, recovering and servicing large numbers of drones on both land and sea, as part of a broader push to expand its uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) inventory.
The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) has outlined a project called the Containerized Autonomous Drone Delivery System (CADDS), aiming to replace manual launch and recovery with automated, rapid deployment of large quantities of UAS in contested environments.
According to the DIU framing, the goal is to enhance mass and tempo while reducing personnel exposure, rather than continuing boutique, manpower-intensive drone operations.
The DIU specifies that these systems must be transportable by military or commercial vehicles, quickly operational with minimal handling, support both homogeneous and mixed UAS types, and operate in all weather conditions, day or night, with a crew of no more than two.
This statement suggests a design focused on dispersion and mobility: smaller crews, lighter support, easier concealment, and resilience after strikes, along with modular mission packages combining reconnaissance, decoy, and strike functions.
This initiative addresses the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) need for agile, scalable swarm operations, as US forces plan to deploy large numbers of drones to maintain superiority over near-peer rivals.
The scale of the effort suggests drones are increasingly being treated as mass rather than scarce assets, with CADDS intended to support sustained, large-scale drone operations.
It’s unclear whether this push is a genuine transformation or a quick fix, especially given recent battlefield experience and the various operational, strategic, and institutional arguments shaping drone swarm use in a Taiwan contingency.
Ukraine’s June 2025 Operation Spiderweb illustrates the tactical and operational potential of this approach. A June 2025 article by Trends Research and Advisory argues that the key lesson was not only the lethality of inexpensive unmanned systems but also the operational advantage created by mobile, concealed basing, which enables strikes from unexpected locations.
The TRENDS report frames Spiderweb’s core lesson as concealment and mobility, using launch setups hidden in ordinary-looking vehicles to enable strikes from unexpected locations and reduce reliance on fixed bases and their signatures and vulnerabilities.
Separate studies argue that containerized launchers could be hidden in commercial shipping and port infrastructure, enabling dispersed, low-signature operations across key sea lanes.
T X Hammes argues in a November 2025 Stimson Center article that modern warfare increasingly favors precision, mass, and survivability, and that containerizing drones allows them to be hidden in ubiquitous shipping containers, moved across land, sea, and air, and launched with little warning, making them challenging to preempt.
Hammes links this directly to China’s ability to strike known bases early in a conflict, potentially degrading US and allied sortie generation at the outset. Hammes suggests dispersing systems across the First Island Chain, quickly scaling and mounting them on commercial platforms to create a resilient intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) network that complicates Chinese targeting, enhances deterrence and defends Taiwan.
At sea, similar logic appears in US naval thinking. Dmitry Filipoff argues in a July 2024 Atlantic Council report that unmanned systems—and by extension swarming drones—are central to Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) because they enable deception, survivability, and force multiplication.
Filipoff argues that affordable, widely distributed unmanned platforms can generate numerous contacts, decoys and ambiguous signatures, straining enemy sensing and decision-making while helping shield high-value ships.
In a swarming construct, he suggests large numbers of drones can make a force appear larger and more complex, forcing adversaries to expend munitions and complicating targeting.
A February 2025 Belfer Center report by Eric Rosenbach and other writers argues that autonomous and semi-autonomous systems must be integrated into a broader joint system of sensors, shooters, and command-and-control, rather than used in isolation.
They state that such systems, including drone swarms, would operate in large numbers in denied environments, providing persistent ISR and strike support while absorbing losses that would be unacceptable for manned platforms.
They also stress the importance of pre-positioning, networking with other forces, and clear rules of engagement to sustain combat power under Chinese anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) pressure.
At the strategic level, Seth Jones argues in a September 2025 report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that the US needs an “offset” to defeat and deter China, which he says enjoys advantages in mass and scale.
Jones defines an offset as an effort to affordably counter an adversary’s advantages through new operational concepts and technologies, and he links this logic to the expanding role of unmanned and autonomous systems and what he calls “precise mass.”
Jones emphasizes the need for sufficient quantities of long-range missiles and cheaper unmanned and autonomous systems, and notes the growing importance of China’s defense-industrial base in shaping the competition.
However, several analysts caution against treating swarms as a decisive solution. Wilson Beaver argues in an April 2025 Heritage Foundation article that drones will complement, not replace, conventional weapons—especially in naval warfare.
He notes that drones and autonomous systems remain largely untested in air and sea combat, and that an Indo-Pacific war would demand range, endurance, payload, and command functions that current drones cannot yet provide.
Beaver also argues that drone swarms, with limited payloads and range, are unlikely to substitute for the effects delivered by conventional precision-guided munitions against ships.
He stresses that warships and manned aircraft provide concentrated firepower, command, and presence, and that adversaries are already developing counters to both individual drones and swarms.
A more fundamental critique comes from Antonio Salinas and Jason Levay in a February 2026 War on the Rocks article, which argues that the current prominence of drones does not signal a true revolution in warfare, but instead exposes institutional and doctrinal weaknesses—especially poor maneuver culture and fragile combined-arms integration.
They write that new weapons often appear dominant because armies and their institutions fail, not because technology has fundamentally changed war. Drawing on Ukraine, they argue that drones thrive in static, attritional conditions and should be understood as symptoms of deeper military shortcomings rather than their cause.
Taken together, these arguments cast the US military’s embrace of containerized drone swarms in a different light, suggesting that the push for CADDS-style systems may be driven as much by institutional limits—fleet size, munitions depth and bureaucratic speed—as by genuine technological breakthroughs.
In the Indo-Pacific, swarms will not replace ships, aircraft, people or institutions. The real question is whether the US can integrate them into a force with the doctrine, command culture and industrial base needed to turn a mass of machines into a lasting strategic advantage—rather than another technological patch for deeper structural problems.