Ukraine’s surprise Sunday strike that used relatively inexpensive drones to knock out a significant portion of Russia’s long-range bomber capability was arguably the single largest blow to Moscow in its three-year war on its neighbor and a stunning display of asymmetric warfare.
“The Pentagon should be very worried about this,” said Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who focuses on drone warfare and nuclear deterrence.A Ukraine-style attack — using drones hidden in shipping containers or trucks — could very well happen on U.S.soil, or against U.S.air and naval bases overseas, she said.
“Any country that has strategic bombers, strategic missiles and silos, or strategic nuclear submarines at port is looking at the attack and thinking the risk to our arsenal from a containerized set of drones disguised as a semitrailer poses a real risk,” said Jason Matheny, CEO of the Rand Corporation and a former director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, which develops advanced technologies for U.S.spy agencies.
Ukraine’s feat was the latest display of an accelerating use of asymmetric attacks, in which one force, often smaller and weaker, deploys unconventional tactics against another.Take, for example, Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who have used relatively low-cost missiles and drones to snarl commercial shipping in the vital Red Sea waterway, prompting a retaliatory U.S.
bombing campaign under President Donald Trump that cost well over $1 billion.
The “character of warfare is changing at a ratio faster than we’ve ever seen,” Army Gen.
Bryan Fenton, commander of U.S.Special Operations Command, told Congress in April.“Our adversaries use $10,000 one-way drones that we shoot down with $2 million missiles.
That cost-benefit curve is upside down.”
Unconventional methods, such as exploiting a technology supply chain, are also being used by established powers to degrade their adversaries.In September, amid attacks across its northern border, Israel pulled off an audacious operation that rigged pagers and walkie-talkies to explode when triggered remotely.The attack contributed to the devastation of Hezbollah’s ranks, from which it has not fully recovered, and may have spared Israel a costly invasion of Lebanon.
Asymmetric warfare is as old as the Bible’s David versus Goliath and as devastating as the Sept.11, 2001, attacks, in which al-Qaeda operatives hijacked U.S.
airliners and killed almost 3,000 people.That plot cost between $400,000 and $500,000, according to the 9/11 Commission.
By some estimates, the United States has spent $8 trillion on post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
But drones, even short-range craft like the ones Ukraine smuggled into Russia, have become the asymmetric weapon of choice because of their relatively low cost, accessibility and remote piloting.And while much has been made of cyberweapons in asymmetric warfare — there was widespread fear about Russia taking out Ukraine’s electric grids and communications networks before it invaded — so far the physical impact has been muted.
Sunday’s drone attacks in Russia took 18 months to plan and involved smuggling drones inside the country on commercial trucks parked near military airfields, where they were then remotely activated and piloted.The audacious attack destroyed at least 13 Russian aircraft, including nuclear-capable bombers that were part of Moscow’s strategic deterrent, and damaged dozens of others.
“That very same [type of] strike can be conducted against us,” said Bradley Bowman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank, adding that the United States has potentially vulnerable bombers and high-value fighter jets deployed worldwide.
For more than three years, the war in Ukraine has repeatedly surprised U.S.officials by showing how inexpensive drones, some even made off 3D printers or controlled by filaments of fiber optic cable, have become multipurpose weapons.
“They can be used as part of infantry fighting, as a form of artillery, as an intelligence asset to gain battlefield awareness,” said Celeste Wallander, assistant secretary of defense for international affairs in the Biden administration.
“The one piece we didn’t have a sense of is whether they could be used to threaten strategic forces.Sunday’s attack made that quite apparent.”
Rep.Jason Crow (D-Colorado) has been urging the Pentagon to accelerate its efforts to learn lessons from the use of drones and other technology in Ukraine.In three years, the United States has gone from being Ukraine’s primary trainer “to actually learning from them more than we are training them,” said Crow, who sits on the House Armed Services and Intelligence committees.
“This conflict has already fundamentally changed the nature of warfare,” Crow said.
The Pentagon, he said, still spends “exorbitant amounts of money” on military programs for conflicts “that would be relevant decades ago.”
Trump in April ordered a comprehensive overhaul of Pentagon acquisition with a focus on speed and flexibility.But the president has also promoted big-ticket items, such as the F-47 sixth-generation fighter jet and his proposed Golden Dome homeland missile defense system, which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently said would cost $175 billion, without specifying what it includes or over what time period.And some analysts have estimated the expense could exceed $2 trillion over 20 years for a modest level of space-based missile interceptors alone.
Beyond their kinetic effect, drones have induced the kind of panic that an adversary, or terrorist, would want to foment in a conflict.Late last year, a spate of drone sightings over sensitive sites in New Jersey, including a U.S.military research facility and Trump’s Bedminster golf club, set off hysteria.The U.S.government struggled to explain the incidents and how it would defend against them.
“No one even knew what they were much less who was behind them,” noted Dmitri Alperovitch, chairman of the Silverado Policy Accelerator think tank.“So the idea that we were prepared has been debunked by reality.”
Trump is expected to sign executive orders as early as this week that would update federal regulations about where commercial drones can be legally flown, in light of last year’s incidents.
The orders will also seek to boost the U.S.commercial drone industry, in part by curbing sales of new Chinese models, which also could have implications for military drone development.
A fundamental issue is that the U.S.government handles domestic drones primarily as law enforcement, not national security, said retired Gen.
Glen VanHerck, who until February 2024 was commander of U.S.Northern Command, responsible for defending the continental United States, which includes Alaska.
VanHerck recalled the 17 nights in December 2023 at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, where unidentified unmanned aircraft buzzed above F-22 Raptor fighter jets “sitting in the open” on the tarmac.“How vulnerable were they if somebody really wanted to take hostile action?”
The Defense Department, he noted, is not charged with drone defense within the United States.It is charged and authorized to defend its installations, but that authority ends at its own fence-line, he said.
Even aircraft stored within hardened structures are vulnerable when exposed during operations, such as taxiing.A Washington Post search of imagery available on Google Earth found B-52 bombers sitting in the open at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
Beyond air bases, U.S.
energy grids, transportation hubs and shipyards are also vulnerable to unconventional attacks using unmanned vehicles.
“If I think asymmetrically, if you’re Russia or China or another actor, what they’d likely do is try to infiltrate the United States and build their weapon from within the country,” VanHerck said.“Or if they put a container ship carrying drones into the Port of Long Beach or somewhere in close proximity to our critical infrastructure, including nuclear ports, that would be really hard to detect.”
A 2018 U.S.intelligence community study examined port screening of shipping containers and found its efficacy to be “really low,” said a former senior intelligence official.“If you’re trying to peer through, say, an eight-foot-wide shipping container, you can’t use normal X-rays.You can use really sensitive detectors to look for very dense material, like a nuclear warhead.
Even that’s imperfect.”
Even if one could scan for drones, such shipments are often perfectly legitimate commercial transactions destined “for Best Buy or some other commercial market,” said the former official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
China, the world’s leading drone producer, could seek to use drones early in a conflict, say, with the United States over Taiwan, Pettyjohn said.
“The Pentagon has been worried about this in the Pacific,” she said.The United States normally parks its aircraft close together on airfields, often in the open.While China could use its ballistic missiles armed with submunitions as a cluster weapon, it could also use remotely pilotable drones as “a very cheap way of achieving” a comparable effect, she said.
“We’ve always known that hardening our bases is something that we need to do,” said Gen.
David Allvin, Air Force chief of staff, at a CNAS conference Tuesday, noting the Pentagon had requested money for upgrades.“Right now, I don’t think it’s where we need to be.”
Aaron Schaffer and Alice Crites contributed to this report..
