Theodore Bunzel and Tom Donilon
On June 1, Ukraine’s security services launched a covert strike on five air bases across Russia. More than 100 attack drones smuggled into Russia in plywood cabins on trucks driven by unsuspecting Russians destroyed bombers sitting on tarmacs as far away as the Belaya air base in Siberia, around 3,000 miles from Kyiv. According to Ukrainian government sources, the strikes took out about one-third of Russia’s long-range bomber force and cost Moscow roughly $7 billion. Dubbed Operation Spiderweb, it was one of the most spectacular and daring attacks to date of the war in Ukraine. It was also a dramatic warning of a growing threat to American soil.
In an essay in Foreign Affairs in January 2022, one of us (Donilon) warned of this threat. Back then, America’s vulnerability to this possibility seemed to be a “failure of imagination,” echoing the 9/11 Commission’s famous conclusion about the United States’ failure to anticipate the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. Today, the drone threat is no longer difficult to imagine. States can use them to sow economic disruption or to spy on sensitive sites, lone-wolf actors can use them for political violence, and hobbyists can accidentally crash them into critical infrastructure.
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