Ukraine’s audacious drone strike on Sunday that may have destroyed several Russian strategic bombers has confirmed long-held fears about first-person view drones, or FPVs, being launched from commercial containers for a surprise attack.
Videos purportedly show the Ukrainian drones being launched from trucks parked near their targets thousands of miles inside Russia. Dubbed Operation Spider’s Web, the attack was 18 months in the making and involved 117 Ukrainian drones launched against four airfields.
Ukraine’s intelligence service claims the FPVs were smuggled into Russia, where they were hidden in the roofs of wooden sheds, which were placed on trucks. Then the trucks were driven near the Russian airfields and the drones were launched remotely.
Ukraine’s attack has revealed that military installations far from the front lines can still be vulnerable to drone attacks. It also comes as the U.S. military struggles to prevent drone incursions at its bases.
In 2024 alone, there were hundreds of incidents involving drones flying over military bases within the continental United States and Alaska, Air Force Gen. Gregory M. Guillot, head of U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, said in February.
“There were 350 detections reported last year on military installations, and that was 350 over a total of 100 different installations of all types and levels of security,” Guillot told the Senate Armed Services Committee.
It’s possible for an adversary to launch drones against military installations in the United States in the same way that Ukraine attacked Russian bases, said Masao Dahlgren, who writes about missile defense for the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, D.C.
“That’s an assumption that we are far from the adversary, we have oceans separating us, that we’re somehow far away from these threats,” Dahlgren told Task & Purpose. “But as these kinds of incidents show, that threat is not as far as we would like to think.”
More drone defenses are needed
Despite the urgent need, the U.S. military has not yet invested enough in low-altitude drone defenses to protect its bases at home from an attack by FPV drones, Dahlgren said.
For the most part, military installations, cities, and critical infrastructure within the United States are not protected by weapon systems designed to destroy drones, such as the Low, Slow, Unmanned Aircraft Integrated Defeat System, or LIDS, Dahlgren said. The U.S. military typically deploys those types of weapons overseas because it remains focused on defeating enemy air forces instead of protecting against drone attacks launched from concealed locations.
Right now, stateside military bases may be equipped with jammers and other “soft kill” methods to stop drones, but the Defense Department needs to rapidly field more drone defenses to protect the United States as a whole, Dahlgren said.
The U.S. military needs to use both aircraft and balloons equipped with sensors to counter drones because the radars that monitor U.S. airspace are not ideal for detecting low-altitude threats, as evidenced when a man managed to land a gyrocopter in front of the Capitol building in 2015, Dahlgren said.
“The No. 1 problem in my mind is sensors,” Dahlgren said. “These targets fly low, and if your radar, your sensor, is on the ground, you’re not going to see them come over the horizon. They literally can fly under the radar until they’re quite close.”
Is the U.S. military prepared?
In recent years, the U.S. military has been preparing to defend against small unnamed aerial systems. For example, the Army has updated the capstone event of basic training to teach soldiers how to conceal themselves from drones.
While certain stateside military installations, such as nuclear missile bases, are well protected, service members at other bases wouldn’t be able to do much to respond to the type of surprise drone attack that was planned over many months, like Operation Spider’s Web, a former senior Defense Department official told Task & Purpose.
Task & Purpose asked each of the military branches about Operation Spider’s Web — specifically focusing on what countermeasures or steps could be taken to prevent a similar strike against U.S. bases at home and abroad.
“The U.S. Army actively monitors all modern warfare developments, including the recent drone attacks reported in Russia over the weekend,” said Army spokesperson Maj. Montrell Russell. “Our primary focus is protecting our homeland, personnel, and critical assets. We regularly update our training and defensive measures to address evolving threats from unmanned aerial systems. While specific tactics cannot be disclosed for security reasons, the Army is committed to ensuring our forces are prepared for current and emerging challenges.”
The Marine Corps has already fielded several systems to its installations that are designed to track, identify and defeat small drones as part of its preparations to defend airfields and other critical infrastructure against drone attacks, said Lt. Col. Eric Flanagan, a spokesman for Combat Development and Integration.
Other drone countermeasures include the vehicle-mounted Marine Air Defense Integrated System, or MADIS, Flanagan said. The Marine Corps is also developing a Light-MADIS, or L-MADIS, for Ultra-Light Tactical Vehicles.
The Marines also announced earlier this year that deploying units would be equipped with prototype systems meant to counter small drones.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Allvin said on Tuesday that the service has budgeted money to add protections to its bases, but he added that the service needs to do more.
“We could really make it very defensible, but if all we’re doing is playing defense and we can’t shoot back, then that’s not a use for our money,” Allvin said while speaking at a conference held by the Center for a New American Security think tank in Washington, D.C.
Allvin also said the Air Force needs to think about the offensive potential of small drones, noting that Operation Spider’s Web has shown that “seemingly impenetrable locations need to pay more attention to that.”
Officials with the Navy deferred questions on the matter to NORTHCOM.
A NORTHCOM spokesperson described the threat that small unmanned aircraft pose to military and civilian infrastructure as “serious and growing.” The command has fielded mobile systems to help detect and neutralize drones; bolstered drone defenses at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and Fort Bliss, Texas; and it continues to test new technologies, such as at the Desert Peak exercise this April at Davis Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona, as part of the U.S. military’s ongoing mission along the southern border.
“We remain clear-eyed about the need to further increase our collective ability to defend installations and infrastructure against an increasing range of potential threats,” the spokesperson said.
Layered defense
Ultimately, there is no “silver bullet” to the threat posed by drones, said retired Army Maj. Gen. Wilson A. Shoffner, former commanding general of the Fires Center of Excellence and Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
The threat posed by drones requires a response from the entire government, including the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Federal Aviation Administration, and local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, Shoffner told Task & Purpose.
Drones come in many different shapes and sizes, each with its own physical and electronic signature, Shoffner said. They also use a variety of methods to navigate, requiring different types of defenses. Some drones, for example, are guided by fiber optic cables, making them difficult to counter using electronic means.
“What we want are multiple lines of defense,” Shoffner said. “We want to intercept the threat as far out as possible and as soon as possible.”
“A wake-up call”
The threat posed by small drones is so serious that it could change how the U.S. military approaches air defense, Dahlgren said.
“We used to consider air defense its own specialty in the armed forces,” Dahlgren said. “You’d have like — you’re an air defender. But now everyone has to be. So, there’s going to be a lot of change in the pipeline, I hope.”
One way of getting that sort of expertise into the “pipeline” could be to have training that requires U.S. troops to identify and defeat short-range quad-copters through a combination of signals intelligence, electronic warfare and weapons that can destroy small drones, said Samuel Bendett, a drone expert.
Ukraine’s attack on Russia also shows what can happen when aircraft are not parked in protected hangars, and are then vulnerable to attacks from small drones, said Bendett, an advisor to the Russia Studies Program at CNA as a Washington DC-based not-for-profit research and analysis organization.
“This attack is probably a wake-up call for many militaries that station their long-range heavy aircraft on the open tarmac across their bases,” Bendett told Task & Purpose. “Russian mil bloggers also pointed out that they called out the MOD [ministry of defense] for failing to keep such strategic planes in hangars, or under, even with rudimentary physical protection.”
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