America Needs to Get Serious About Drones
· The Atlantic
For the past two years, Ukraine has made dramatically effective use of small, cheap drones as complex and deadly tools of warfare. America has paid little attention. So little, in fact, that analysts have been sounding the alarm for some time about the lack of U.S. preparation for the new age of war.
A recent swarm of drones over an American military installation with nuclear weapons ought to change that. During the week of March 9, several waves of 12 to 15 drones flew over Barksdale Air Force Base, in Louisiana. They loitered there for as long as four hours at a time. These were technologically advanced drones, far more sophisticated than those a hobbyist might own. They were also reportedly resistant to jamming.
Visit somethingsdifferent.biz for more information.
According to a confidential briefing obtained by ABC News, “After reaching multiple points across the installation, the drones dispersed across sensitive locations on the base,” indicating that the drone operators had a preplanned list of targets to surveil. They may also have been sent to test U.S. defenses.
What makes the incident particularly worrying is that Barksdale is home to the 2nd and 307th Bomb Wings, each with dozens of nuclear-capable B-52H bombers. These aircraft are part of the U.S. nuclear triad of bombers, land-based ballistic missiles, and ballistic-missile-armed submarines. Barksdale houses the Global Strike Command, which controls the Air Force components of the nuclear triad. The United States does not publicly disclose where nuclear weapons are stored, but Barksdale seems a likely location.
Drones the size of those over Barksdale can travel only short distances from their operators, typically about 20 to 50 kilometers. That limitation, plus the nature of the vehicles and the target of their surveillance, strongly suggests that malign foreign actors launched them from inside the United States.
[Simon Shuster: Building tanks while the Ukrainians master drones]
The episode bears an uncanny resemblance to Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb against Russia. Last June, Ukrainian drones concealed inside of pallets on trailers were released to conduct a coordinated, simultaneous attack on several air bases deep inside Russia. About 20 Russian aircraft were reportedly destroyed or damaged, including nuclear-capable Tu-22M3 and Tu-95 bombers. It was the single worst day of the war for the Russian Air Force. The incidents at Barksdale suggest that the U.S. fleet of nuclear-capable bombers is just as vulnerable as Russia’s was.
Barksdale hasn’t been the only target. Also this month, unidentified drones were spotted over Fort McNair, in the Washington, D.C., area. Some prominent U.S. officials live there, among them Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.
Given that the United States has made eliminating Iranian leaders a top priority of the war it is waging, Iran could very well be interested in killing a senior U.S. official on American soil. But Russia is also a possible culprit. In the past year, Russia has been probing Polish and NATO airspace with cheap, disposable drones. NATO countries across the North Sea area have also reported numerous drone incursions, particularly over sensitive NATO facilities. Russia denies involvement, but many observers (including myself) believe that Moscow is responsible for a significant number of these events.
China, too, has the capability and possible motivation to have conducted the drone flights over Barksdale. It has a robust drone-development program and the manufacturing base needed for mass production. And China is certainly interested in the war in Iran—particularly in seeing it shrink America’s supply of available long-range precision weapons. The fewer of these the United States has, the sooner China will consider a successful invasion of Taiwan possible. China was conducting reconnaissance flights with balloons over the United States as far back as the first Trump administration, before they were caught red-handed in 2023.
The problems drones pose are not easy ones. Nations now need to defend everywhere, all the time, against threats ranging from a $1,000 quadcopter with a half-pound of explosives to multimillion-dollar ballistic and hypersonic missiles. The United States isn’t alone in being caught flat-footed. Ukraine was the first to adopt drone warfare as the centerpiece of its defense strategy, spurring Russia to employ its own drones: Lancet loitering munitions, which turned out to be one of their most effective weapons against Ukraine.
[Brynn Tannehill: What the drone strikes on the Kremlin reveal about the war in Ukraine]
Ukraine and Russia have been locked in a move-and-countermove race to jam each other’s drones while making their own drones more resistant. Drone countermeasures need to be relatively cheap to be viable. Ukraine has draped nets over many of the roads vital for logistics. Both sides have made effective use of decoys, such as plywood M777 howitzers that are cheaper and easier to replace than the drones used to destroy them. Russian President Vladimir Putin is working to increase domestic security against drones. And perhaps the most important counter-drone development has been Ukraine’s inexpensive, plentiful new interceptor drones, which have performed well against Iranian-made Shahed suicide drones.
The United States now faces some of the same difficulties that Russia does. A big country with a big military has a lot of airspace and many potential targets to protect. An anti-drone system that can cover all of these assets will cost dearly in time, money, and effort—but given the pace of technological development, such a system could be obsolete before it is even ready.
One way to protect American military assets from small drones is to place them in hardened aircraft shelters. But these are expensive and can still be penetrated by high-end missiles. For this reason, the current U.S. Air Force doctrine of Agile Combat Employment prefers dispersing assets rather than counting on hardened facilities to protect them.
But that strategy seems to have been developed in order to counter long-range Chinese munitions in the Pacific, not small-drone swarms with near-real-time targeting within the continental United States. Facilities that were once safe havens from all but the highest-end weapons systems are now exposed to American adversaries with little more than a fleet of small drones. Washington needs to reconsider using hardened shelters for its nuclear-capable bombers, as costly as they are. At a minimum, it should follow the Ukrainian example and place its vital military assets under other sorts of protective shelters, or even netting. And it should be acquiring and fielding interceptor drones much faster—again, just as Ukraine has so successfully done against Shaheds.
Four years into the war in Ukraine, the United States is unprepared for the radically new form of warfare that has been raging there. The swarms over Barksdale suggest how high the price could be.