Ukraine's game-changing drone attack is a wake-up call for vulnerable US airbases, particularly in the Pacific

Business Insider

2 days ago

Ukraine's shocking drone attack on the Russian bomber fleet and other strategic aircraft shows just how vulnerable US bases and planes, especially those in the Pacific, could be to a similar kind of attack by an adversary.
The need to harden American airbases to protect US airpower assets has been an important topic of discussion for years now, particularly amid China's military rise and the significant expansion of its ballistic missile arsenal, but Ukraine's attack on Russia has reignited this discussion and fueled others.
Operation Spiderweb saw Ukraine sneak more than one hundred drones into Russian territory and launch them near key airbases. The Ukrainians say they struck 41 Russian aircraft, including an unspecified number of strategic bombers. Ukraine says the damage it inflicted could exceed $7 billion. The operation was very unusual, raising key questions.
US military leaders took note. For instance, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George observed this week that the attack indicated the need to adapt to the quickening speed of warfare.
Spiderweb, Phelan said at an artificial intelligence defense conference this week, "was pretty prolific." The operation, George noted at the same event, showed that the US needed to be more agile and think further about acquiring more counter-drone systems.
George also said the attack was another example of Ukraine's asymmetric advantage that's been demonstrated throughout the war, using relatively cheap drones to destroy expensive, exquisite Russian air power. It's something the US needs to be thinking about, too, he said.
Military leaders and defense experts have long recognized the growing threats to US airbases and American airpower, particularly in the western Pacific, and the need to harden defenses there to prevent a strike from an adversary like China from taking out bombers and fighters before they get off the ground.
But Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb, Tom Shugart, an adjunct senior fellow with the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, told Business Insider, "should be a wake-up call at the senior policymaker level and congressional level to pay attention. There is no sanctuary anymore."
US airfield expansion and fortification efforts have been limited in recent years, troublingly so in the Pacific. Facilities are seriously lacking in passive defenses, like hardened aircraft shelters and sufficiently dispersed forces. The issue is especially glaring compared to China's consistent work over the past decade on building shelters to hide aircraft, adding runways, and increasing ramp areas.
In a Hudson Institute report earlier this year, Shugart and Tim Walton, a senior fellow at Hudson's Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, said that this has created an imbalance. Should the US and China go to war, the latter would need fewer shots to suppress or destroy airfields used by the US and its allies and partners. China would have more capacity for sustaining its air operations.
Shugart and Walton also said the rise of foreign drones flying over military bases demonstrated a need for the Pentagon to harden its airfields, especially key ones that house bombers.
Ukraine's attack on Russia is expected to ignite important conversations about anti-drone defenses at bases, Mark Cancian, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told BI.
The focus has been on missiles, but drones come with a different set of problems. To protect against drones, it isn't enough to fortify shelters. "You have to be careful about any openings," Cancian said, explaining that "you can't have a roof and then an open front because they'll just fly in." One solution he said may start to appear is a mesh structure or curtain for those openings.
Ukraine's recent strike on Russian airpower could be just a glimpse of what such a future attack could look like, experts said. Sunday's attack, Walton told BI, "was in the form of quadcopters; in the future, it could be similar drones but with even greater autonomy, small, low-cost cruise missiles, or other weapons."
The list of potential targets could grow, too.
Spiderweb demonstrated something that military experts and planners have long understood: aircraft are vulnerable on the ground, and striking them before they can take off can severely limit a military's air power capabilities. But future strikes could be on ships in the accessible littorals, ground stations, air and missile defense sites, and so on.
The lessons from this strike for the US Department of Defense, experts said, include understanding how an adversary could pull off a similar attack.
Tim Robinson, a military aviation specialist at the UK'S Royal Aeronautical Society, said that in light of the attack, the West will have not only need to consider hardening their bases but also potentially build "more of them than you have aircraft" to either confuse the enemy or fill with decoys.
As Congress meets with military leaders this week, and service budgets are determined, "members should ask how are US bases and other critical facilities defended against these threats today; how much funding is required to appropriate passive and active defenses; and how much of that funding is included in the fiscal year 2026 president's budget proposal," Walton said.
There are also questions around whether Golden Dome, the Trump administration's plan to fulfill a Reagan-era vision for a major missile and air defense network, will incorporate any lessons from this attack. Some industry figures have said that the project, while it is primarily about missiles, can't overlook the drone threat. US military leaders are saying the same.
Robinson said that "if you're an air force chief and you are not lying awake at night thinking about how to protect" yourself, then "you're going to lose the next war."