Ukraine’s Drone Attack Points to a U.S. Vulnerability

Jon Gruen

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A B-1B Lancer at Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City, S.D., July 16, 2020. Photo: Airman Quentin Marx/Associated Press

Imagine this: Beijing launches a surprise invasion of Taiwan. As U.S. forces mobilize to respond, something far worse unfolds here at home.

Sleeper agents—Chinese operatives who entered the U.S. months or years earlier—activate. In basements and garages across the country, they’ve been quietly assembling first-person-view drones from commercially available parts for a few hundred dollars each.

Loaded with homemade explosives, they launch in a coordinated wave across the U.S. targeting Air Force bases, civilian airports, power stations and other critical infrastructure. In less than an hour, a sizable portion of our strategic air fleet is reduced to scrap metal. Tens of billions of dollars in damage. Domestic air travel grounded. Major cities in the dark. America paralyzed.

This may feel like an outlandish plot to a Hollywood thriller. But it’s all too plausible. Crowded public events like the 2026 World Cup or the 2028 Olympics are potential targets, and law enforcement could lack the technology, training and legal authority to respond.

The House Homeland Security Committee released a warning last year that few noticed. More than 24,000 Chinese nationals were apprehended at the U.S. southern border in the first half of fiscal 2024, surpassing the total number of such encounters during the entire previous year. Committee leaders have suggested some of these aliens could be covert operatives or saboteurs seeking to cross the border in preparation for conflict. Rep. Dan Bishop last year called the surge of Chinese migrants a “major national-security vulnerability.”

If the sabotage scenario still feels far-fetched, consider what happened last week in Russia. Ukraine sneaked cheap explosive-laden drones deep inside Russia to destroy high-value aircraft parked at air bases thousands of miles from the front lines. Some of the destroyed bombers were nuclear-capable. The total value of the damaged and destroyed assets likely exceeds billions of dollars. The cost to Ukraine? A few tens of thousands of dollars in parts and payloads. Russian air defenses never saw it coming.