It turns out Volodymyr Zelensky did have another card to play.
Ukraine’s astonishing drone attack on military airfields and critical assets deep inside Russia on Sunday blindsided the Kremlin, destroyed at least a dozen strategic bombers and marked a seismic shift in modern warfare.
The mission, dubbed Operation Spider’s Web, was a fresh reminder to leaders of the world’s most advanced militaries that the toughest threats they face today are not limited to their regular rivals with expensive gear. Instead, swarms of small, off-the-shelf drones that can evade ground defenses can also knock out billions of dollars of military hardware in an instant.
What happened in Russia can happen in the United States — or anywhere else. The risk facing military bases, ports and command headquarters peppered across the globe is now undeniably clear.
We don’t yet know if the operation will impact the Trump administration’s push for a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia, but it nonetheless delivered a tactical defeat to Russia’s military and will put pressure on President Vladimir Putin to respond. And what is almost certain is that the innovative use of inexpensive technology will inspire other asymmetric attacks that inflict serious damage against a well-heeled adversary.
Mr. Zelensky, Ukraine’s president, called the attack, which was planned by Ukraine’s Security Service, or S.B.U., his country’s “longest-range operation.” By smuggling more than 100 explosive-laden quadcopter drones across the border in cargo trucks, Ukraine managed to evade air defenses and then fly the drones undetected above four Russian bases, where they damaged or destroyed what Ukrainian officials said were more than 40 high-value aircraft used in the assault on Ukrainian cities. Those involved with the attack left Russia before it began, Ukrainian officials said. The operators could watch live video and hover the aircraft above their targets before steering them into a nosedive.
The extent of the attack — and the choice of targets — opens a new chapter in how drones are used in modern warfare, one that was improbable even a decade ago. The widespread availability of technology in the intervening years has empowered Ukraine to have mostly free rein in the skies above its larger, wealthier enemy, despite having a limited traditional air force.
The U.S. military understands Russia’s vulnerability firsthand. Although American pilots have managed to control the skies where they operate since the Korean War, U.S. troops in recent years have come under greater danger from drones. Militant groups have used the aircraft, which are a small fraction of the size of U.S. warplanes, to target American positions in the Middle East, dropping crude munitions that have maimed and killed American service members.
The U.S. military has globe-spanning technology to detect, track and shoot down ballistic missiles, but — so far — its multimillion-dollar systems remain helpless against the drone threat. The Pentagon has tried to develop technologies and defensive tactics, but results have been spotty at best. So-called hard-kill tactics to blast the drones out of the sky, or soft-kill methods to electronically disable them, haven’t proved to be silver bullets. The unmanned aircraft typically fly low to the ground and don’t always transmit their positions. Current radar systems are engineered to spot larger flying objects.
American commanders increasingly realize that forces stateside are just as exposed. Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, the head of Northern Command, told Congress in February that there were some 350 detections of drone overflights above 100 military installations in the United States last year. Those small drones appeared to be more of a nuisance than a threat, but Spider’s Web exposed the risk of not taking them seriously.
The Federal Aviation Administration has licensed more than a million drones in the United States. Most fly by the rules, but sightings of drones making illegal flights are on the rise. The F.A.A. reports there are now 100 drone sightings around airports each month, despite federal law that requires them to avoid flying near airports in controlled airspace without authorization.
Military bases and aircraft hangars should be hardened to guard against the worst. Congress is poised to set aside about $1.3 billion this fiscal year for the Pentagon to develop and deploy counter-drone technologies. This is a good start. But the Pentagon’s most ambitious and expensive plans fail to address the threat.
President Trump unveiled plans last month for his $175 billion antimissile shield, called Golden Dome, which aims to shoot down all manners of ballistic, hypersonic and cruise missiles. The program, which is under development, wouldn’t protect the United States from the types of small drones Ukraine used in Spider’s Web.
The United States has spent millions of dollars to help Ukraine manufacture and fine-tune its drones but has not pushed American contractors to do the same. The Pentagon has been slow to procure the smaller, cheaper, less advanced brand of drones that are omnipresent over the battlefields in Ukraine. In August 2023 it did announce a project to field thousands of autonomous systems. The billion-dollar initiative, called Replicator, was inspired by lessons learned in Ukraine to manufacture inexpensive drones and make them widely available by this fall. The Pentagon has said vanishingly little about the effort’s systems and programs since Mr. Trump took office, though.
The most technologically advanced fighting force that the world has ever known — the same one that ushered in the age of drone warfare with its missile-firing Predators and Reapers at the turn of the century — has been slow to adopt this technology. The irony won’t escape many in the Pentagon. Let’s hope Ukraine’s attack inside Russia on Sunday motivates America’s war planners to address the nation’s stark vulnerability to similar threats and its own pressing need to increase its fleet of small drones.
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W.J. Hennigan writes about national security, foreign policy and conflict for the Opinion section.
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