Christian Brose
Ukraine Attacks Russian Air Bases in Far-Reaching Drone Strikes,” the Washington Post reported on June 1. “How Israel’s Mossad Smuggled Drone Parts to Attack Iran From Within,” the Wall Street Journal reported two weeks later. And just like that, the future of warfare has become today’s headline news. Both operations followed a similar pattern: Technologically savvy militaries used large numbers of low-cost, easy-to-produce autonomous systems to inflict damage on their targets — usually sophisticated, highly capable, and effectively irreplaceable pieces of military hardware that cost orders of magnitude more than did those operations to the attackers.
Indeed, in Operation Spiderweb, Ukraine likely expended less than $150,000 in weaponised drones to inflict a loss of up to $7 billion in Russian strategic bombers that had taken decades to produce. What is more remarkable about headlines such as these is how familiar they have become. Back in 2020, many were caught off guard when Azerbaijan used low-cost unmanned aircraft and artificial-intelligence-enabled attack drones to rapidly defeat Armenia’s tanks and other traditional forces in Nagorno-Karabakh. Now, on a nearly daily basis, Russia bombards Ukrainian cities with one-way attack drones — effectively low-cost cruise missiles — mass-produced in Iran.
For its part, Ukraine, despite lacking a traditional navy, has sunk Russia’s warships and pushed the rest of its Black Sea fleet out of Crimea with cheap, explosive-laden drone boats. By some estimates, millions of drones were expended on the battlefield in Ukraine in 2024 alone. The U.S. military has not escaped this revolution in warfare. Its bases and personnel across the Middle East have been under nearly constant drone attack for years. Three U.S. service members were lost to such attacks in 2024. In recent combat against Houthi militias, the U.S. has lost MQ-9 Reaper aircraft worth more than $200 million and three F-18 fighter jets, while expending dozens of multimillion-dollar missile interceptors to defend U.S.
warships from one-way attack drones that cost just tens of thousands of dollars. Years of repeated drone incursions on military bases in the United States — bases that host billions of dollars’ worth of advanced aircraft, ships, and weapons — demonstrate how something like Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb could happen in our own homeland. The future of warfare is here, now. If we are to rise to the challenge, new technologies are important, but they are only part of the answer. What is needed instead is a broader reimagining of how the U.S. military builds and projects power.
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