Norinco has developed two world-first anti drone swarm weapons

Bullet Curtain barrage gun and Hurricane 3000 high power microwave will reshape drone warfare

Drones are heralding a new era of warfare in the Ukraine battlefield. As much as 70% of all casualties are reportedly caused by drones.

Most of the drones deployed in Ukraine are low-end first-person-view (FPV) drones that have very limited range and firepower.

The real danger of drone warfare between technically sophisticated major militaries will not be individual drones, but rather drone swarms, where dozens or even hundreds of cheap disposable drones are deployed for a saturation attack on enemy positions.

Such swarm attacks are extremely hard to defend against in full. Even if the defending side has advanced air-defense capabilities, shooting them down will cost many times more than the attacking side.

The drone swarming tactic poses an unprecedented threat to air defence by capitalising on sheer number and scale.

FPV drones cost a few hundred dollars and the more capable Shahed drones from Iran cost several tens of thousands.

In comparison, air defense missiles cost millions of dollars apiece. For example, a single basic Patriot (MIM-104) interceptor costs around $4 million. A SM-6 interceptor costs between $4.3 to 4.9 million.

The cost-exchange ratio between offense and defense is so lopsided that no military, however well financed, can sustain defending against drone swarms with traditional missile interceptors and other “point” weapons (shooting at the drones one at a time).

In future drone warfare, China has a native advantage, being home to over 90% drone production worldwide.

It dominates the end-to-end supply chain from airframe, flight controllers, propulsion systems, batteries, motors, sensors, and software.

Most of the global drone supply chain is located around Shenzhen in Southern China.

Over 90% of Ukraine’s FPVs depend on Chinese supply chains, sourced from 3^rd party intermediaries. Same for the Russia drone fleets.

Drones are expected to play a critical role in a Taiwan operation with both sides actively planning on the deployment of sophisticated drone swarms.

China has already developed the world’s first drone carrier – the Jiutian drone mothership – which can launch over 100 drones from its cargo bay. https://huabinoliver.substack.com/p/introducing-jiutian-drone-swarm-carrier

While China has an overwhelming scale advantage in any drone wars, defending against enemy drone swarms is still a major tactical issue to resolve.

The PLA recently disclosed two anti drone swarm weapon systems from Norinco, one of China’s largest state-owned military contractors. Both are already in operational service.

The first such weapon is called the “Bullet Curtain” or “Bullet Wall”, a 16-barrel barrage gun system that can neutralise a broad range of low-flying aerial threats including rockets, helicopters, mortar shells, missiles, and most notably, drone swarms.

The second weapon is the Hurricane 3000 High Power Microwave (HPM) system that use electromagnetic “soft kill” to fry the onboard electronics of drone swarms.

These two systems compliment air defense interceptors such as the HQ9, HQ-22, HQ-19, and HQ-29 platforms to form a multi-layered air defense kill web at different ranges and against different aerial threats.

Other directed energy weapons (DEWs) include high-energy laser LY-1 (Liaoyuan-1), the world’s biggest laser weapon shown in the Beijing military parade last September.

Today, I’ll dive into the Bullet Curtain and the Hurricane 3000 systems as they are ground-breaking innovations first of its kind.

Bullet Curtain anti drone swarm barrage gun system

The Bullet Curtain system employs a unique “plane-to-point” interception method, creating a wall of projectiles to blanket incoming targets with overlapping firepower.

The weapon was first unveiled in April 2025. The system features 16-barrel guns that can shoot 450,000 rounds of high velocity bullets per minute.

The “bullet barrage” can cover incoming positions of all targets, achieving 100% effective interception in tests.

Conventional anti-air systems typically rely on “point to point” interception, aiming directly at incoming threats. But China’s new concept changes the game.

By allowing multiple guns to fire together, the system creates a plane of fire, essentially a wall of bullets, to intercept fast, unpredictable targets.

In chief designer Yu Bin’s words, “Imagine the target is a fly. The traditional air-defence interception is like throwing stones at the fly continuously … and now the barrage system is like swinging a fly swatter, which covers the entire area where the fly may move.”

“While traditional air-defence weapons only hit at a single point, we are building a canopy capable of countering a saturation attack,” Yu said.

The barrage gun system features a 4x4 tight arrangement of 35mm gun barrels for various types of ammunition, including advanced hit efficiency and destruction (AHEAD) ammunition that spits hundreds of sub-projectiles each to form a barrage against drones.

The system also integrates radar, an optical detection system, fire-control system, and ammunition within one single platform.

The weapon has been fitted on a 6x6 truck and configured as a road-mobile air-defence cover embedded in mechanised units.

Its modular design means the Bullet Curtain system can also be integrated with various platforms, including wheeled and tracked armoured vehicles, naval ships, and fixed installations.

This allows rapid deployment across different combat scenarios while staying compatible with existing military infrastructure.

The size and type of the barrage could be adjusted by computer based on the characteristics of the incoming target, to determine the best way to neutralize the threat.

In field trials, a single barrage was able to take down all small-sized drones, with similar success shown against fast-moving targets like missiles, rockets, mortar shells, and howitzer fire.

The United States and Taiwan have already begun deploying drones like the MQ-4C Triton and MQ-9B Reapers against China. Taiwan’s Defense Ministry has ordered 3,500 locally produced drones.

Taiwan’s defence plan places drones at the centre of its asymmetric strategy. Larger drones are to be used for surveillance and command support, while mid-range and smaller UAVs will conduct electronic warfare, sensor jamming, and real-time strikes on Chinese forces during beach landing operations in their war plans.

Similarly, the US military has announced plans to deploy drone swarms in a war with China with what it calls the “Replicator” program.

Norinco’s barrage weapon is tailor-made to counter these evolving threats.

With its dense firepower, mobile deployment options, and area-wide interception ability, the new barrage weapon reflects a deep shift in how Beijing is preparing for future wars.

China is not merely preparing to overwhelm the enemy forces from the US and its vassals with large scale drone swarms but also figuring out how to defend against the same tactics from the enemies. At this point, the US has not demonstrated any comparable capabilities.

Hurricane 3000 directed energy anti-drone swarm system

This is a vehicle-mounted high-power microwave (HPM) weapon, jointly developed by Norinco and China South Industries Group.

Hurricane 3000 employs directed energy – microwave pulses – that is dispersed over wide area at once. This would effectively burn out the onboard electronics of drones operating in a swarm simultaneously.

By employing intense bursts of focused microwave energy, Hurricane 3000 overloads and disrupts the onboard electronics of drones. This includes flight control, navigation, sensor, and onboard data links.

Electromagnetic pulses are the key to this technology.

Such a system is not only more efficient than kinetic interceptors, it is highly cost-effective since the system is not limited to physical ammunition but is instead only limited by energy use.

The HPM system is mounted on the chassis of an eight-by-eight heavy truck, with its power source, cooling systems, and a planar microwave emitter (plus associated radar and optical gear).

This system is known as a “soft kill” that avoids debris and collateral damage.

The Hurricane 3000 is not a system onto itself. It is a “system of systems”—an important piece of a much larger complex web of air defenses primed to stop enemy drones from wreaking havoc on Chinese forces in war.

The system will operate alongside missiles, lasers, and an assortment of other electronic warfare (EW) weapons.

Furthermore, the primary goal of the Hurricane 3000 is wide area denial (rather than just local-point defense).

This indicates a shift toward broader battlefield control when combined with the panoply of other sophisticated Chinese AD systems.

The Chinese doctrine in a Taiwanese contingency calls for the rapid neutralization of Taiwanese and US intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) drones as well as any attack drone swarms.

Such a move will significantly degrade enemy situational awareness and delay effective responses.

High-Powered Microwave weapons underscore that high-end conflict will revolve around dominance of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum.

Jamming, spoofing, hardening, and DEWs are now all core warfighting domains.

What sets the Hurricane 3000 apart from similar microwave weapons deployed by other militaries is its super long kill range of over 3 kilometers, which is almost twice that of the best competing system from the US including Epirus Leonidas and Raytheon’s THOR systems.

China’s sophisticated anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) kill web has led to the Pentagon to conclude any war with China over Taiwan would end in a US defeat in its recent Overmatch Briefing assessment.

Bullet Curtain and Hurricane 3000 are more examples of where the Chinese have simply leapfrogged the Americans in military technology, similar to hypersonic missiles, GaN AESA radars, anti-satellite weapons, and 6th generation fighters.