We're all vulnerable to a Ukraine-style drone strike

Asia Times

2 days ago

Ukrainians are celebrating the success of one of the most audacious coups of the war against Russia – a coordinated drone strike on June 1 on five airbases deep inside Russian territory.
Known as Operation Spiderweb, it was the result of 18 months of planning and involved the smuggling of drones into Russia, synchronized launch timings and improvised control centers hidden inside freight vehicles.
Ukrainian sources claim more than 40 Russian aircraft were damaged or destroyed. Commercial satellite imagery confirms significant fire damage, cratered runways, and blast patterns across multiple sites, although the full extent of losses remains disputed.
The targets were strategic bomber aircraft and surveillance planes, including Tu-95s and A-50 airborne early warning systems. The drones were launched from inside Russia and navigated at treetop level using line-of-sight piloting and GPS pre-programming.
Each was controlled from a mobile ground station parked within striking distance of the target. It is reported that a total of 117 drones were deployed across five locations. While many were likely intercepted, or fell short, enough reached their targets to signal a dramatic breach in Russia's rear-area defense.
The drone platforms themselves were familiar. These were adapted first-person-view (FPV) multirotor drones. These are ones where the operator gets a first-person perspective from the drone's onboard camera.
These are already used in huge numbers along the front lines in Ukraine by both sides. But Operation Spiderweb extended their impact through logistical infiltration and timing.
Nations treat their airspace as sovereign, a controlled environment: mapped, regulated and watched over. Air defence systems are built on the assumption that threats come from above and from beyond national borders. Detection and response also reflect that logic. It is focused on mid and high-altitude surveillance and approach paths from beyond national borders.
But Operation Spiderweb exposed what happens when states are attacked from below and from within. In low-level airspace, visibility drops, responsibility fragments and detection tools lose their edge. Drones arrive unannounced, response times lag and coordination breaks.
Spiderweb worked not because of what each drone could do individually, but because of how the operation was designed. It was secret and carefully planned of course, but also mobile, flexible and loosely coordinated.
The cost of each drone was low, but the overall effect was high. This isn't just asymmetric warfare, it's a different kind of offensive capability – and any defence needs to adapt accordingly.
On Ukraine's front lines, where drone threats are constant, both sides have adapted by deploying layers of detection tools, short-range air defenses and jamming systems. In turn, drone operators have turned to alternatives.
One option is drones that use spools of shielded fibre optic cable. The cable is attached to the drone at one end and to the controller held by the operator at the other. Another option involves drones with preloaded flight paths to avoid detection.
Fiber links, when used for control or coordination, emit no radio signal and so bypass radio frequency (RF) -based surveillance entirely. There is nothing to intercept or jam. Preloaded paths remove the need for live communication altogether. Once launched, the drone follows a pre-programmed route without broadcasting its position or receiving commands.
As a result, airspace is never assumed to be secure but is instead understood to be actively contested and requiring continuous management. By contrast, Operation Spiderweb targeted rear area airbases where more limited adaptive systems existed.
The drones flew low, through unmonitored gaps, exploiting assumptions about what kind of threat was faced and from where. Tu-95 bombers were among the planes destroyed. Photo: Almaz Mustafin via The Conversation
Spiderweb is not the first long-range drone operation of this war, nor the first to exploit gaps in Russian defences. What Spiderweb confirms is that the gaps in airspace can be used by any party with enough planning and the right technology.
They can be exploited not just by states and not just in war. The technology is not rare and the tactics are not complicated. What Ukraine did was to combine them in a way that existing systems could not prevent the attack or maybe even see it coming.
This is far from a uniquely Russian vulnerability – it is the defining governance challenge of drones in low-level airspace. Civil and military airspace management relies on the idea that flight paths are knowable and can be secured. In our work on UK drone regulation, we have described low-level airspace as acting like a common pool resource.
This means that airspace is widely accessible. It is also difficult to keep out drones with unpredictable flight paths. Under this vision of airspace, it can only be meaningfully governed by more agile and distributed decision-making.
Operation Spiderweb confirms that military airspace behaves in a similar way. Centralised systems to govern airspace can struggle to cope with what happens at the scale of the Ukrainian attacks – and the cost of failure can be strategic.
Improving low-level airspace governance will require better technologies, better detection and faster responses. New sensor technologies such as passive radio frequency detectors, thermal imaging, and acoustic (sound-based) arrays can help close current visibility gaps, especially when combined. But detection alone is not enough.
Interceptors, including capture drones (drones that hunt and disable other drones), nets to ensnare drones and directed energy weapons such as high-powered lasers are being developed and trialed. However, most of these are limited by range, cost or legal constraints.
Nevertheless, airspace is being reshaped by new forms of access, use and improvisation. Institutions built around centralized ideas of control; air corridors, zones, and licensing are being outpaced.
Security responses are struggling to adapt to the fact that airspace with drones is different. It is no longer passively governed by altitude and authority. It must be actively and differently managed.
Operation Spiderweb didn't just reveal how Ukraine could strike deep into Russian territory. It showed how little margin for error there is in a world where cheap systems can be used quietly and precisely.
That is not just a military challenge. It is a problem where airspace management depends less on central control and more on distributed coordination, shared monitoring and responsive intervention. The absence of these conditions is what Spiderweb exploited.
Michael A Lewis is professor of operations and supply management, University of Bath
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.