Ukraine may not have “the cards,” as President Donald Trump put it, but it does have drones.
They were used to great effect over the weekend in an audacious attack within Russia that has focused the world’s attention on a revolution in warfare.
A badly outmanned and outgunned country just reached far inside its adversary’s territory to destroy or damage hugely expensive, nuclear-capable strategic aircraft with low-cost drones basically indistinguishable from ones available on Amazon.
It’s not quite David versus Goliath, because the Russian giant is not going to be felled by the blow, but the diplomatic and psychological impact of the raid could be profound, as Ukraine seeks to demonstrate to the West its staying power.
For creativity and outsized effect with widely available devices, the Ukrainian attack is in the same league as Israel’s beeper attack on Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon last year.
Both operations also carry a message about new vulnerabilities — to a compromised supply chain and to surprise drone attack — that should make us take notice.
We’ve just watched the equivalent of aviation legend Billy Mitchell’s demonstration in 1921 when he had US planes sink a former German battleship, in a display of the emerging potency of air power.
Operation Spider Web, as the Ukrainians called it, combined Mission Impossible-style intrigue — the drones were secreted within Russia and some of them launched from containers attached to trucks, unbeknownst to the drivers — with clever technical innovation.
The attacks spanned several time zones and hit 41 Russian aircraft, according to the Ukrainians.
The operation was the latest iteration of an ever-evolving, cat-and-mouse drone war between Ukraine and Russian.
The Ukraine war is essentially a war of attrition, yet it is anything but static, as the means of waging it is changing almost by the week.
Offensive innovation is met with defensive counter-move, triggering another change on offense.
Drones are vulnerable to electronic jamming? Then, they’ll be controlled by massive spools of fiber optic cable.
Drones threaten supply routes? Then, the roads will be covered with netting.
Drones are targeted by drones? Then, the drones will carry their own anti-drone cages.
Drones have, in some ways, replaced artillery. Estimates are that drones now inflict about 70% of casualties on both sides, and there are literally millions of them.
Russia deployed roughly 4 million drones last year, and Ukraine about 1.5 million.
We have much to learn from all this. After last weekend, every commander of a US base should be thinking anew about potential vulnerability to drone attack, and it’s not hard to imagine the Chinese utilizing drones to execute a wide-ranging strike in the Western Pacific if Beijing goes after Taiwan.
The United States, once a leader in drone technology when it used Predators and the like to take out enemies in the War on Terror, hasn’t kept up with the adaptations happening in the Ukraine war.
Inevitably, our own processes are our worst enemy.
As Nathan Ecelbarger, head of the US National Drone Association writes, the system for acquiring drones “remains deeply flawed, overly bureaucratic and resistant to innovation.”
And military policies regarding the integration of drones haven’t been updated in more than a decade.
“Squad leaders,” he notes, “shouldn’t have to be Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Communications Commission and Department of Defense policy experts to get their hands on emerging drone technologies.”
We’ll have to focus more on defenses, too, whether early detection or counter-drone capabilities.
The problem with using missiles to defeat drones is the asymmetry in expense — a SM-2 missile costs millions, whereas a Houthi drone costs thousands.
And drone swarms could overcome a battery of missiles.
This is the reason technologies being developed by next-generation defense firms like Epirus, working on a directed energy counter-measure, are so important to fund and, one hopes, deploy.
What’s happening in the Ukraine war isn’t an exception, but the rule of human conflict. Whoever takes the technological leap ahead in war-fighting capability often prevails, while the laggard is left to contemplate his castle reduced to rubble or his fleet sent to the bottom of the ocean.
Twitter: @RichLowry