When I first read the reports of the Ukrainian drone attack on Russian airfields, destroying dozens of Russian bombers, I had a number of reactions. Here’s Paul Adams’s and Jaroslav Lukiv’s report at the BBC:
Ukraine says it has completed its biggest long-range attack of the war with Russia on Sunday, after using smuggled drones to launch a series of major strikes on at least 40 Russian warplanes at four military bases.
President Volodymyr Zelensky said 117 drones were used in the so-called “Spider’s Web” operation by the SBU security service, striking “34% of [Russia’s] strategic cruise missile carriers”.
SBU sources told BBC News it took a year and a half to organise the strikes.
Russia confirmed Ukrainian attacks in five regions, calling them a “terrorist act”.
The attacks come as Russian and Ukrainian negotiators head to Istanbul, Turkey, for a second round of peace talks on Monday.
My main reaction was that I thought we should wait for the other shoe to drop. Another reaction was that any who thinks that the attack will bring Russia to the bargaining table are sadly mistaken. The third was that Max Boot in his Washington Post column has the right idea:
On Sunday morning, Dec. 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy rewrote the rules of warfare. Almost no one had imagined that the Japanese could sneak across an entire ocean to attack an “impregnable fortress,” as U.S. strategists had described Hawaii. Yet that is just what they did. Japanese aircraft launched from six aircraft carriers managed to destroy or damage 328 U.S. aircraft and 19 U.S. Navy ships, including eight battleships. The Pearl Harbor attack signaled the ascendance of aircraft carriers as the dominant force in naval warfare.
The Ukrainians rewrote the rules of warfare again on Sunday. The Russian high command must have been as shocked as the Americans were in 1941 when the Ukrainians carried out a surprise attack against five Russian air bases located far from the front — two of them thousands of miles away in the Russian Far North and Siberia. The Ukrainian intelligence service, known as the SBU, managed to sneak large numbers of drones deep inside Russia in wooden cabins transported by truck, then launch them by remote control.
but that he’s asking the wrong questions:
If the Ukrainians could sneak drones so close to major air bases in a police state such as Russia, what is to prevent the Chinese from doing the same with U.S. air bases? Or the Pakistanis with Indian air bases? Or the North Koreans with South Korean air bases?
I don’t think he recognizes the implications of this sort of asymmetric warfare. The questions he should be asking are
- What if the Houthis mount a similar drone attack against U. S. air bases?
- What if some unidentified or widely dispersed terrorist organization mounts a similar drone attack against U. S. air bases?
After all if Chinese balloons can gather intelligence from U. S. military bases, a highly destructive can be mounted against our military bases by anyone with a few thousand dollars to spend and the inclination to do so. You don’t need to be a major power or even a country for that.
Meh.
As long as we have enough tranny officers……
Agree with Drew. It’s a well known fact that trans people cant read radar or work computers.
Steve
Yes, obviously modern global communications complemented with autonomous systems makes attacks conducted far away from the person triggering the attacks possible in a new way.
But I presume this is a solvable problem, for places that need hardening, anti-drone drones can be placed to ensure defeat of any such attack.
In some ways, physical security is heading towards where cybersecurity headed about a decade ago; cybersecurity moved away from defense at the perimeters of an organizations network to “zero trust” a hardening at each node inside the network.
Possibly soluble for Russia or China but not for the United States. We are unaccustomed to such hardening and, simply stated, won’t do it. If we can’t control our southern border, we can’t prevent that kind of attack.
And that isn’t the approach we’ve been using for the last 80 years. That approach is based on not having any enemies that can attack us. Consider Germany as a test case.
Over a period of 60 years Germany invaded Western Europe three times. It hasn’t done that once over the last 80. What changed? Some would say it’s because we disarmed Germany and maybe that played a part but I don’t think it’s the whole story. I think that Germany hasn’t invaded Western Europe for 80 years because we have enabled it to accomplish its foreign policy objectives by letting the U. S. pursue them for it. I don’t think will work for China or Russia.
This particular kind of attack should be pretty easy for the US to defeat, just keep planes in their hangars, which is largely what the Air Force already does. Ukraine had hit some other Russian planes with drones in the past so I cant tell if the Russians parked their planes in the open, pretty standard for them apparently, because they dont have enough hangars or they just thought they were safe so far back from the front lines.
https://cepa.org/article/ukraine-cant-destroy-russias-air-force-on-the-ground/
Steve
AS I noted, it would very easy for the US to not suffer this kind of attack especially since we arent really vulnerable. However, have to wonder if the unappreciated part is the likely effect on day to day life in Russia with the slowing of truck traffic.
https://www.twz.com/air/latest-on-russian-aircraft-loss-assessments-from-ukrainian-drone-strikes
Thinking about the way the US tied itself in knots and opened a security spending gusher after 9-11.
Terrorists might poison the water, the food, no place was safe and no one was trusted.
Russia is a very different country than ours but I suspect the government there will double their level of paranoia and that has to hamper civilian and military operations.