Ukraine had already demonstrated that cheap, almost consumer-class, drones can be a major factor in modern warfare.
But this weekend, they took it to a whole new level.
In case you haven’t seen the news yet, over the weekend Ukraine destroyed an estimated 34% of Russia’s nuclear-capable bomber fleet and an unknown amount of its submarine capability; the total assets destroyed have a aggregate estimated value of over $2 billion so far.
This would be a shockingly large result for a weekend regardless, but the significant part is how they did it.
Drone. It was drones.
But not, as they have been doing for a while, via long-range attacks into Russia that were launched from Ukraine.
They drove a fleet of trucks and vans and trailers that they’d modified with hidden compartments loaded with drones deep into Russia and parked them next to airfields and submarine bases.
Then the drones flew out, onto the bases and blew up at their targets.
While this operation has been reported to have taken a year and a half of planning, it must have taken several weeks just to get all the drone carriers into place. Secretly, without any hint of this activity making it into the press and clearly without Russia having realized what they were up to at all.
Now, that is being “clean on OPSEC”.
So, Ukraine is to be congratulated for having pulled off such an ambitious and daring operation.
But we do need to to take a moment to look at two things that this incident demonstrates that have serious implications for the rest of us:
- even after three years of active war, the border was open enough to drive a bunch of civilian vehicles through and then deep into Russia
- while this certainly wasn’t cheap to do, its cost would be well within the reach of a small group of moderately wealthy individuals (or a large group with less financial backing)
And, on a smaller scale, this kind of thing is within reach for anyone with a few thousand dollars to put into it.
So, ya know: guerrilla warfare and terrorism just got shown an amazing new tool.
I’m sure lots and lots of professionals will be spending lots and lots of time analyzing defenses and responses to this. And some particularly creative ones probably started before last weekend.
There will be whitepapers and wargames aplenty looking at this tactic.
But the important lesson to learn here is probably that everything is vulnerable.
Almost anyone could strike at almost anywhere like this.
So the most effective way to deal with that situation is probably to not give anyone a good reason to by, oh for example, invading their country or expropriating their resources or suppressing a population or anything like that.
Because now we know the tech is there, and affordable; all anyone needs is a reason and the will to do it.
