Ukraine's Drones Just Took Down a Chunk of Russia's Bomber Fleet. What Does That Mean for America?
When anyone can have an air force, superpowers aren't as powerful as they used to be.
When a drone popped out of the back of a broken-down truck on the side of a Siberian highway on Sunday, bystanders didn't know what to make of it. "Holy smokes! Technology's come so far! Why are we even driving anymore? Better off piloting that drone," the narrator of a viral video said. "The cops are after it, would you look at that! Some idiot's spraying bullets everywhere!"
The Russian police, it turns out, were right to shoot at the drone. It was headed straight toward the airbase near Irkutsk. Across the country, swarms of small explosive drones descended onto military bases and destroyed a large part of Russia's nuclear bomber fleet. The flying bombs were smuggled into Russia by Ukrainian intelligence services in a plot known as Operation Spiderweb.
The Ukrainian drone attack was an audacious, desperate, and dangerous gamble on the eve of this week's peace talks between Russia and Ukraine. ("Trump said we don't have the cards—this shows we do have the cards, and we can play them," Oleg Ustenko, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, told Politico.) It was also a demonstration of a trend unfolding worldwide: Drones now allow weaker forces to go toe-to-toe with even nuclear superpowers.
Fighters on both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian war and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and rebel movements around the world—are becoming skilled at using drones to replace conventional air power. The drone revolution was partially driven by militaries developing cheap explosive suicide drones, also known as "loitering munitions." Another major factor has been the rise of drones as a civilian hobby. Anyone with access to an electronics store can buy or build a one-man air force now.
Drones were not always "weapons of the weak." The first armed drone strikes were carried out by the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a symbol of Washington's ability to spy on and kill enemies from across the globe. Turkey developed a homegrown drone line, Bayraktar, during its war against Kurdish rebels. Israel began selling a line of loitering munitions known as the Harpy and Harop, which Azerbaijan used to crush the Armenian separatists of Karabakh in 2020.
But weaker states were also jealously eyeing the potential of unmanned aerial vehicles. Iran used captured Israeli and American surveillance drones to kick-start its own line of Shahed drones. The Shahed was revolutionary because it was so cheap to manufacture and operate; Iran could spread this technology to even nonstate allies, such as the Houthi rebels in Yemen and Iraqi militias.
The technology spread upward, too. Cheap loitering munitions were an attractive prospect to superpowers that could manufacture such weapons at scale.
"I asked one of the companies, I said I want a lot of drones, and you know, in the case of Iran, they make a good drone, and they make them for $35,000 to $40,000," U.S. President Donald Trump told an audience during a recent visit to Qatar. "So I said to this company, I want to see it. Two weeks later, they came to me with a drone that cost $41 million. I said, that's not what I was talking about, $41 million. I'm talking about something that costs $35,000 to $40,000, where you send thousands of them up."
In late 2022, Russia paid $2 billion to set up a Shahed mass production plant on its own territory. Rather than coming up with a Shahed copy, Ukraine imported the Bayraktar. Europeans crowdfunded for Ukraine to buy Bayraktar drones, some of which brought down the Russian flagship Moskva. Ukraine is now building a Bayraktar plant on Ukrainian soil.
The Middle East has been torn up by proxy wars fought with European weapons for decades. Now Europe is suffering from a proxy war fought with Middle Eastern weapons.
Meanwhile, drones were becoming a popular civilian hobby. The Chinese company DJI came out with the Phantom quadcopter, the first cheap and easy-to-use consumer drone, in 2013. While these first drones were designed for photography, another subculture popped up around first-person view (FPV) racing, in which drone pilots would use virtual reality headsets to pull off acrobatic maneuvers.
The Islamic State group quickly figured out how to use consumer drones to drop grenades on the Iraqi army. Russia and Ukraine adopted the same tactic during their war, using Chinese consumer drones (or domestic copies) to hunt down each other's troops. Because the drones carry a camera, there has been a proliferation of gruesome drone-eye-view propaganda videos of troops being killed from the air.
In October 2023, Hamas broke through Israel's "Iron Wall" fortifications around Gaza, leading to the worst outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian violence in history. One of the most effective tactics in that attack was the use of consumer drones to take down Israeli communications towers and machine gun turrets. On the other hand, American supporters have been crowdfunding to buy Israeli forces their own consumer drones, one of which filmed the final moments of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.
The latest innovation in air warfare has been the rise of fiber optic drones. By last year, Russian forces had developed an advantage in radio jamming, which allowed them to interfere with Ukrainian drones' remote control systems. Ukraine's answer was to simply run a fiber optic cable from the ground to the drone. As cartoonish as it sounds, it works. The Ukrainian military has launched drone attacks controlled by gigantic spools of cable, stretching tens of miles through the air. Images on social media show fields literally covered in webs of optical fiber.
Another potential solution to radio jamming is installing artificial intelligence on drones, allowing the drones themselves to make targeting decisions without orders from the ground. Last week, the Ukrainian military claimed to have deployed a new drone "mothership" that can launch AI-powered swarms of small explosive drones.
For better or for worse, drone warfare is here to stay. Even if governments around the world banned consumer drones—unlikely, given how much industry and first responders rely on these flying machines—the parts and know-how to build them would still be easy to obtain.
In 2002, the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist wrote A History of Bombing, tracing the cultural effects of air warfare through the 20th century. At first, Europeans fantasized about using airpower to hold onto their colonial empires forever, wiping out the rebellious "savages" with no risk or cost. After witnessing the effects of World War II and the atomic bomb, however, the world's elites realized that they were also vulnerable to these new aerial weapons.
Just before his death in 2019, Lindqvist published a revised edition of A History of Bombing that addressed the growing drone threat.
"The drone war is the unmanned opposite of the mass armies of the Great War. Convenient—so long as the other side hasn't got one," he wrote. "What if the drone becomes every man's or at least every state's weapon? Will it not be too easy to wage war, if all you risk are machines, not soldiers?"
