May 24, 2026:
China has been adapting the Iranian Shaheed drone, known as the Sunflower-200, to attack American targets in Guam and the Western Pacific. China is obtaining or making one million OWA/One Way Attack drones for a constant million drone swarm campaign. The objective is to destroy or suppress American /Taiwan/allied military logistics and bases from Guam to the China coast for at least ten weeks throughout a Taiwan invasion. These would crush defenses like a modern Pearl Harbor-style strike, turning bases into what 1940 Philippines ports looked like, by day three.
Technical upgrades on Shaheed design include adding a second fuel-efficient engine to the base Shaheed design. Examples include the PD-2900, with a 2,500 kilometer range, 12-hour endurance, 250 kilometers an hour speed, and adapting the Russian Su-57-like stealth jet’s radar absorbing exterior. Chinese military planners call this aircraft the Guam killer OWA drone. China compared their Shaheed to combat-proven clones like the Sunflower-200. These are cheap, $50,000 to $200,000 each, depending on range/guidance compared to American cruise missiles like Tomahawk that cost $1.4 million each. Sunflower-200 carries precision-guided munitions. A single 50 kg thermobaric-fragmentation warhead or dispersible mines can target soft infrastructure—power, fuel, maintenance at air bases far more efficiently than one large warhead.
These improved Sunflower-200 Shaheed equivalents are being built for launch from container ships and fishing trawler fleets, enabling wide-area coverage of the entire Pacific. Combined with thousands of anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles, they make close-in American operations extremely risky. In addition to inflicting crippling damage on naval bases at Pearl Harbor and in California and Washington state.
China criticizes the American military and specifically Pearl Harbor Admirals in the American Navy for being years behind. For example, the Americans have only recently been considering Ukrainian drone swarms while China was working on this a year and a half ago. American bases lack sufficient hardening in the form of concrete shelters or reverse slope mountain shelters, leaving aircraft vulnerable to Ukrainian style mass drone attacks. The only sane American strategy in the event of a Chinese attack against Taiwan is a distant blockade to defeat China without direct confrontation near its coast.
Improved Shaheed-class OWA drones are a low-cost, high-volume asymmetric weapon which will immediately neutralize American forward bases in the Western Pacific in any Taiwan conflict, forcing a reconsideration of American strategy toward distant blockade. American complacency will be overwhelmed by drones’ proven combat record and the ease with which drones can be quickly built in large quantities.