By Rich Lowry
Syndicated Columnist
The future of warfare is here
Ukraine may not have “the cards,” as President 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 a 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 U.S. planes sink a former German battleship, in a display of the emerging potency of air power.
Ukraine’s Operation Spider Web 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 innovation.
The attacks spanned several time zones and hit 41 Russian aircraft, according to the Ukrainians. The operation was the latest iteration of a cat-and-mouse drone war between Ukraine and Russia. The Ukraine conflict is essentially a war of attrition, yet it is anything but static, as the means of waging it change almost by the week. Offensive innovation is met with defensive countermove, 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. And drones will be attacked by other drones. What the siren of the Stuka dive-bomber was to the Blitzkrieg — an unmistakable herald of a new way of waging war — the high-pitched whirr of the drone is to the Ukraine war.
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 U.S. 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.
Once a leader in drone technology when its Predators were taking out targets in the War on Terror, the U.S. hasn’t kept up with the adaptations happening in the Ukraine war. Inevitably, our own bureaucratic processes are our worst enemy.
As head of the U.S. National Drone Association, Nathan Ecelbarger, writes, the system for acquiring drones “remains deeply flawed, overly bureaucratic and resistant to innovation.”
We’ll have to focus more on defenses, too, from early detection to counter-drone capabilities. The problem with using missiles to defeat drones is the asymmetry in expense — an SM-2 missile costs millions, whereas a Houthi drone costs thousands. And drone swarms could overcome a battery of missiles.
This is the reason why the work of next-generation defense firms like Epirus, which has developed a scalable, high-power microwave technology platform that can knock a swarm of drones from the sky, is so important.
What’s happening in the Ukraine war is the norm in human conflict. It’s adapt or watch your castle get reduced to rubble, your fleet get sent to the bottom of the ocean or a leg of your nuclear triad get assaulted by, essentially, a plaything of hobbyists.
Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.
(c) 2025 by King Features Synd., Inc.