China

◈ Theater Assessment

China's undersea drone posture in Southeast Asia remains the most operationally significant near-term concern, with the Indonesian recovery of a suspected PLA submersible drone continuing to anchor regional security discourse and drawing sustained analytical attention to Beijing's subsurface ISR campaign across contested maritime zones. No new reporting in the current window materially alters the prior assessment: China continues to operate across three simultaneous drone vectors — undersea reconnaissance, Taiwan Strait counter-UAS doctrine, and Russian electronics supply — with each line of effort reinforcing a broader posture of deniable, multi-domain pressure. The Indonesian incident is now generating secondary effects, accelerating regional debate on undersea domain awareness investment among Southeast Asian states, which itself reflects the strategic signaling value Beijing extracts from such operations.

◈ Key Developments

• ›The Indonesian underwater drone recovery continues to drive regional security discourse, with analysts characterizing it as evidence of a years-long Chinese subsurface ISR buildup across Asian littoral zones — no new physical evidence emerged this window, but strategic attention to the incident is intensifying rather than fading
• ›China's structural role supplying approximately 90% of Russian UAV electronics remains intact with no reporting of disruption to intermediary export networks, sustaining Beijing's leverage over Moscow's drone warfare capacity
• ›PLA doctrinal articulation of stealth drone swarm employment for Taiwan Strait counter-UAS operations remains the most recent public signal of maturing Chinese operational planning beyond generic deterrence
• ›Chinese ground-vehicle-based microwave recharging capability for airborne drones, demonstrated in prior window, holds as an uncontested development with no follow-on reporting contradicting or advancing the technical baseline

◈ Operational Trend

China's drone posture continues its trajectory from industrial and export dominance toward active multi-domain deployment, with the undersea ISR dimension now generating measurable second-order effects in the form of accelerated regional counter-drone investment — an outcome that confirms PLA operational presence is influencing adversary behavior, not merely signaling intent.