If most of the fighting in a future conventional war is carried out by unmanned systems, military power is redefined as the capacity to combine AI with robotics, and manufacture the result in large numbers.
That is the argument made by Andreas Urbanski, who has worked in AI partnerships at Google Cloud and in military hardware production at Airbus Defence and Space.
On his account, as a guest contributor to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), that capacity currently belongs mainly to China.
Why China is Pulling Ahead
Urbanski points to demographic pressure as one driver. China’s population is projected to shrink by 250 million people by 2050, and its workforce by at least a quarter. Russia has recorded approximately 1.4 million dead and wounded in its war against Ukraine, and Germany struggles to recruit enough volunteers to reach its North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) target of 260,000 soldiers. For the governments of China, Russia, and Germany alike, he argues, machines that can fight are becoming a demographic necessity.
China’s industrial position reinforces the point. In 2024, Chinese factories installed 295,000 industrial robots, against 32,200 in the United States and 26,982 in Germany. In humanoid robotics, Chinese firms took close to 90 per cent of the world market in 2025; two manufacturers, Unitree and AgiBot, each sold more than 5,000 robots, while every American manufacturer combined sold fewer than 500.
Most military robots will not fight directly, Urbanski notes. They will scout, clear mines, and carry supplies. But the systems that do fight, autonomous quadrupeds, aircraft, and boats, draw on the same manufacturing base, down to shared batteries, sensors, and actuators.
Underlying this is a harder bottleneck. China produces 90 to 98 per cent of the permanent magnets used in drone motors and actuators, and has tightened export controls on rare earth minerals since 2025. More than 80,000 components across approximately 1,900 US weapons systems depend on minerals that China controls.
The Software Race, and Its Limits
The contest extends to software as well as hardware. Stanford University’s AI Index found that the performance gap between Chinese and American frontier AI models has essentially closed, achieved with less than five per cent of the private AI investment made in the United States.
Leading Chinese models are open-weight and up to 50 times cheaper to run than their American counterparts; Alibaba’s Qwen family of models has passed a billion downloads. Open-weight models are not subject to export controls, are not confined to facilities controlled by a single government, and can be adapted by state and non-state actors for specific military uses, a combination that raises the risk of the technology spreading beyond the states that developed it.
China does not hold every advantage. Stanford’s researchers found that AI-powered robots still fail nine in 10 everyday tasks, the United States retains a lead in autonomy software through companies such as Waymo and Tesla, and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has not fought a war since 1979.
China is training robots for combat in dedicated centres, however, and Russia’s drone war against Ukraine has generated a large body of battlefield data that Chinese systems, and the components inside them, may help convert into practical experience.
A World Growing Less Peaceful
These developments are against a backdrop of global peacefulness deteriorating for a 12th consecutive year in 2026, according to the Institute for Economics & Peace’s Global Peace Index (GPI) 2026. The report recorded 61 active state-based conflicts, the highest number since the end of the Second World War, and found that 99 countries, the largest number in 20 years, became less peaceful over the past 12 months.
Global violence now costs an estimated US$21.8 trillion a year, and conflict deaths reached more than 181,000 in 2025, six times the level recorded in 2008.
Behind these figures lies a change in how wars are fought. Drone strike events worldwide rose from 364 in 2018 to more than 42,000 in 2025, and in several recent conflicts artificial intelligence (AI) has compressed the time needed to review and authorise a strike from about a day to approximately 20 seconds. For the first time, IEP researchers note, machines are making life-and-death combat decisions faster than a human being can meaningfully review them.