Ukraine’s Drones Just Took Down a Chunk of Russia’s Bomber Fleet. What Does That Mean for America?
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 co
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