A New Era

Today, the Ukrainians launched “Operation Spiderweb”, the culmination of eighteen months of planning, setup and staging of what appears to have been a relatively modest quantity of hardware and a fairly small number of covert operatives. Cargo trucks, hauling trailers of one-way suicide drones and fused to detonate after their launch or upon tampering, were driven to within striking distance of major Russian air bases- ones where their strategic bombers are based. On a signal, the trucks (evidently carrying sheds with remote-controlled actuators inside) disgorged their drones. Ukraine’s SBU secret service claims that 117 drones successfully attacked, resulting in a reported forty (approximate) losses. Rep

Technically, this feat isn’t unprecedented. We’ve been watching drones hunt people in the first person for the past two years across Ukraine, and as early as 2015, Syrian rebels and the Islamic State were live-streaming drone strikes on hapless Iraqi tankers; Americans have been watching guided bombs scream into targets for long enough to have gotten bored of the whole idea and come up with literal non-explosive Hellfire missiles fitted with literal swords for “precision” decapitation strikes. But one of the truths of warfare is that sometimes the new things aren’t really new until something massive happens, it’s just that no one was paying attention. June 1st, 2025 is going to be viewed the same way as December 7th, 1941 in terms of what it means for warfare.

Let’s step back into history for a second. The advent of air power was initially ignored by most of the navies of the world, with even exhibitions like Billy Mitchell’s orchestrated sinking of the Ostfriedland being viewed as a curiosity. As technology developed and more aviators came into positions of leadership, the fear of an aerial attack on a harbor became more real- US Navy fleet exercises tested the defenses of Pearl Harbor and the Panama Canal in the 1930s, the British RAF deliberated over how to protect their ships docked at Portsmouth and Scapa Flow, and the Italians installed anti-aircraft cannon at Taranto to protect their ships docked Regia Marina at anchor. The Japanese invested heavily in aerial torpedoes and developed the superlative “Kate” torpedo bomber to deliver air-dropped torpedoes into the hulls of American ships. By 1940, everyone knew that an aerial attack on a base was plausible and possible. Yet, few were actually ready for it. Americans lulled themselves to sleep over lazy Hawaiian Sundays. Italians locked their ammunition away and neglected to stand night watches on the cannon. Even successful demonstrations of the concept like the 1940 British attack on Taranto failed to raise the temperature enough to gain meaningful recognition. This state of affairs persisted until the incident was so massive, public, graphic and embarrassing that it had to change the status quo. After Pearl Harbor, naval power was forever changed- even if the technical applications of force were similar, the entire scope of warfare was different, and the embarrassment and novelty of those humiliations led to escalations far beyond the impressions of all but the most farsighted leaders. It isn’t just aviation either- guerrilla resistance against Japanese and German occupiers directly inspired the Viet Cong and countless other revolutionaries in their techniques; cybernetic warfare roared onto the scene in the 1990s, the War on Terror introduced my generation to the hell of cheap, ubiquitous “improvised explosive devices” capable of punching through advanced armor with copper slugs.

Sometimes, these moments are punctuated with rollouts of secret new technologies, like the first tanks lumbering onto the battlefield at Cambrai. Sometimes, it’s not even violent, like when the commissioning of HMS Dreadnought instantly rendered every other battleship obsolete in terms of a head-to-head naval battle between ships-of-the-line. Other times, the defining moment isn’t even new or a novel technology, but simply the timely, smart implementation of an existing and mature way of war- for instance, the stellar marksmanship and rifle doctrine of the British Expeditionary Force helping to stave off the far-superior numbers of the Imperial German Army in the opening months of World War I. In all cases, though, these events spur new doctrines, new technologies, and new ways of war- and they rarely break open wartime stalemates or paradigms entirely.

Back in the present, let’s look at what this means to the Russians and their war. At the height of the Cold War, both the U.S. and the U.S.S.R could muster thousands of strategic combat aircraft- long-range strike fighters like the F-105 and SU-7, intercontinental subsonic bombers like the Tu-95 and B-52, faster penetration-capable strategic bombers like the Tu-22 or B-58, stealthy bombers like the B-1 or Tu-160, et al. Time, neglect and political arrangements have rendered the vast majority of both of our strategic air forces obsolete and decaying in “long-term storage”, obsolescent or outright dismantled. Estimates of the Russian long-range strategic aviation program before today approximated somewhere between 90 and 120 aircraft that were fully mission-capable, a number roughly equivalent to the American 150-ish (between B-52 Stratofortresses, B-1 Lancers, and the 18 or so surviving B-2 Spirits). These aircraft have been used extensively for conventional warfare and peacetime training by both our countries, but their core purpose isn’t dropping bombs on third-world goatherding insurgents, it’s to perform long-range strategic missions. Carrying cruise missiles to enemy bases. Patrolling wide swathes of ocean with ship-killing cruise missiles, or cutting supply lines. Mining ports in one sortie. They are the “first leg” of the old nuclear deterrent triad, offering leaders a demonstrable, controllable method of communicating force to further politics. Even without atomic weaponry, the strategic bomber allowed powers to give battle far, far from their homelands or the frontlines- Tom Clancy’s seminal work “Red Storm Rising” is literally the story of how Soviet bombers could savage the North Atlantic with long-range masses of cruise missiles to strike devastating blows in the opening days of a war, potentially winning a Hot War for them. In the Clancyverse, it takes the heroics of a NATO submarine squadron (at a heavy cost) to stifle Russian strategic aviation via Tomahawk barrage; even so, the outcome is in doubt (and an astute reader questions whether killing a few dozen Backfires and Bears at the height of Soviet readiness would really be a permanent incapacitation)…but that was the degree of importance which the old military establishment and our cultures assigned those planes. To a greater extent than a fighter squadron or a destroyer or a tank battalion, the strategic bomber conveys power.

In the Clancyverse, it took an intricate submarine operation, a wave of Tomahawks, and at least two American submarines lost to strike a blow similar to what Ukraine just pulled off with a few semi trucks and some Amazon-sourced drones (and probably a few Starlink terminals, since we have footage). The first would have cost billions of dollars in 1980s money, placed thousands of lives at direct risk, and was considered by most to be a worthy bargain. This effort probably cost less than an average Hollywood movie, risked dozens of lives (complete guess) and was able to destroy or damage nearly 45% of Russia’s active strategic aviation forces. Let’s parse the implications of that.

First, the planes destroyed were almost certainly the best planes of their type in the Russian inventory. Hangar queens are called that for a reason- they’re often stored off the flight line, partially disassembled, cannibalized for parts and constantly under repair. Flight lines are typically where active planes are staged for missions, cleaning, training, etc, especially in good weather. It’s kind of part of being on active alert- the planes are fueled, armed, with ready crews nearby. This makes them ripe targets for a drone strike, especially one aimed by AI image recognition and without effective base defenses (which we can infer from the lack of disruption of their final attack video uploads). Ukrainians have stricken nearby airfields with drones before (including high-value aircraft like an A-50 Mainstay), but this fusion of long-range infiltration and targeted large-scale attacks on strategic assets is unprecedented. Losing 40 of these planes- once again, something like half of their active fleet- means that Russian will now no longer have the ability to sortie enough bombers to reliably punch through a NATO or CONUS defense. Other missions, like Arctic deterrence, maritime patrol, conventional cruise-missile strikes on Ukraine, or even training, are going to be significantly curtailed- missions once spread among 90 planes are now going to be spread among 40 or so, and the associated wear and maintenance will increase. These planes are also very difficult to replace- each one was the collective effort of a well-developed Soviet aviation industry, and that industrial base has atrophied considerably. Even if a few could be replaced relatively quickly from reserves, the effect of losing what were probably forty of their best, most-modern planes won’t fade fast.

Second, and more importantly, this heralds an entire new era for all of the world’s militaries. I’m not an expert in Russian base defense protocols or layouts, but I sense that a nation that was famous for “closed cities”, secret police and travel controls is probably a bit more difficult to get close to military assets than the Land of the Free we live in. Here in the United States, the vast majority of our military and military-industrial infrastructure is colocated with major cities- you can see the Tinker AFB flight line from I-40; Bossier City’s Barksdale AFB is certainly within one Temu-drone flight from the slums of Shreveport or a rural Bossier City back-road; Norfolk and Charleston and Honolulu all host massive vehicle parks, naval bases and well-populated flight lines alongside well-defined critical infrastructure like dry docks, cranes, tugs, etc. Boeing’s vast aircraft-assembly plants can be found on Google Earth, the Red River Arsenal’s tank-refurbishment plants are known targets, and even Sig Sauer’s machinery for churning out the new M-7 rifle platform can be targeted pretty easily. Hell, a sufficiently asshole-ish asshole could put a drone swarm into the old Springfield Armory buildings in Springfield, MA as a demonstration of ill intent if they wanted to. Even a carrier battle group at sea isn’t foolproof- it wouldn’t take much for a freighter, fishing trawl or yacht to simply disgorge a few thousand one-way drones with thermite charges, glue, explosives or various flavors of nefarious evils and accept the platform loss as a cheap expense to mission-killing a carrier. How would an escort package geared to defeat the Russian missile swarm deal with ten thousand Temu drones looking to melt radars, slag catapults and burn parked planes on the deck? Heck, even something as mundane as a motor pool is now at existential risk- the 1st AD motor pools at Fort Bliss can be easily seen from Highway 375 that literally loops through the base, and I’m entirely certain that even an obsolete drone can make the ten-mile flight from Ciudad Juarez’s sovereign Mexican soil to the parade-perfect parking lots of Abrams, Strykers, Bradleys, fuel trucks, etc. (to say nothing of the barracks populated with many of the American service members who make the whole operation possible in the first place). Forget North Korean missiles- this is the real future. Military and civil infrastructure has always needed protection, but now, it’s not a reenactment of Red Dawn we’re concerned about- it’s the very real potential that a lot of the legacy weapons systems and infrastructure we have based our way of fighting on might be taken out in a real, physical way that is a lot harder to stop then air-gapping, cyber-security awareness and good training. Nothing I am aware of in the modern arsenal, or in our modern doctrine, accommodates for a drone swarm on a homeland target.

I don’t know the particulars, or the solutions, or the answers to the questions. I suspect we’re going to hear a lot about dispersal and hardening and camouflage and jamming. The Star Trek fan in me is like “well, we obviously need a phaser turret/array” and maybe some flavor of scientifically-implausible deflector shields. The realist in me realizes that the answer will cost billions of dollars a year, tens of billions of dollars for new systems, and that the entire ways of doing business for the world’s military are going to have to shift to accommodate this new risk- the legacy combat platforms are still absolutely vital for power projection, but protecting them just got a lot more complex. The cynic in me realizes that this will prompt inevitable changes to civil rights, new concerns for BRAC efforts, and that it’s quite likely the Chinese or other rivals already have similar drone-packages staged near our critical infrastructure. The soldier in me realizes that this is an evolutionary sea change that makes war far, far more terrifying than ‘just’ literally being hunted by flying shotguns. War is already terrible; this is just another evolution thereof. The politician in me realizes that Trump’s “Golden Dome” just became a much more local necessity for the 21st and 22nd Centuries but needs to be orders of magnitude more robust; imagine the chaos if those drones are targeting hospitals or power plants or transformer stations or schools or individual politicians (for example). We are solidly at the point of SKYNET or Project Insight…and although I don’t image flying Helicarriers anytime soon, I think that the prospect of buzzing flying death is something we need to keep in mind.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DJznvZ6pftP/?igsh=bTRkeHB4ZGNic2Jp