The war in Ukraine has become the default reference point for how Western policymakers think about drone warfare, and it is increasingly treated as a template for what a future Taiwan contingency might look like. This roundtable starts from a different premise: that the People’s Liberation Army does not read Ukraine as a template to copy, but as a case filtered through pre-existing doctrinal commitments, above all intelligentized warfare and system destruction warfare. Drawing on EH4S’s policy brief on the subject, the discussion will examine which features of the Ukrainian battlefield the PLA is likely to internalize, which it is likely to discount, and why the maritime geography of the Taiwan Strait produces a fundamentally different drone-warfare problem than the contiguous front lines of Ukraine.

The stakes extend beyond Taiwan. China is Russia’s principal military partner, and reporting on Chinese training of Russian drone operators suggests that PLA doctrine, not only PLA hardware, is already migrating into the European theatre through Russia.